https://toarcheio.org To Archeio project site Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:47 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1 https://toarcheio.org/items/the-causal-powers-of-social-change-the-case-of-modern-greek-society/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:47 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/the-causal-powers-of-social-change-the-case-of-modern-greek-society/ Continued]]> This article provides an empirical exploration of social change, by assessing subjective experiences and evaluations in relation to social alterations in Modern Greek society. The investigation concerns whether change in everyday life deriving from the Greek crisis also involves an alteration in the ways that Greeks perceive and consider social reality and themselves within it. This article supports the view that social change is related to agency in terms of reflexivity and that Greeks have contributed to social change through the alteration of their ways of thinking and behaving. Participants reported that practices, norms and mentalities inhereted by previous generations are no longer helpful. Customs (such as clientilism) and mentalities (such as prioritizing the personal over collective interest) must now change and be reformed as the new reality demands different ways of thinking and rapid adaptations to a new way of living which has become economically restricted and politically unstable. In this sense, Greeks are becoming reflexive towards the present situation and themselves within it and critical towards the past and future, as they consider what part of the older generation’s established mentalities to retain and what aspects of their way of living will alter.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-greferendum-and-the-eurozone-crisis-in-the-danish-daily-press/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:44 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/the-greferendum-and-the-eurozone-crisis-in-the-danish-daily-press/ Continued]]> This article presents a critical analysis of the Danish press coverage of the referendum called by the Left-led coalition government of Greece in July 2015, concerning the future of austerity policies. It focuses on the conservative daily press of Denmark, one of the ‘core’ EU countries, writing on developments in the periphery. Three main themes emerge in the study’s discourse analysis of Berlingske Tidende’s and Jyllands Posten’s coverage: ‘post-democratic realism’, ‘the upper-class gaze’, and ‘Orientalism and cultural racism’. The authors not only reveal the one-sided, elitist coverage by the rightwing papers at Europe’s centre but also point out how the principles of neoliberalism itself and the acceptance of austerity are being constantly reinforced by the media in a country like Denmark, which had previously been marked out for its more progressive welfare capitalism. Denmark’s turn to the Right (and to racism) alongside its biased coverage of the ‘Greferendum’ are examined here in the context of the way in which neoliberalism and its politico-social effects are now presented as both common sense and the only way forward.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/dispatches-from-the-greek-lab-metaphors-strategies-and-debt-in-the-european-crisis/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:16 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/dispatches-from-the-greek-lab-metaphors-strategies-and-debt-in-the-european-crisis/ Continued]]> This field note is a first attempt to reflect on the choreography of the European crisis from a psychosocial perspective. It focuses on the situation as it has been unfolding in one of the debtor countries of the South, namely Greece. After mapping a variety of metaphors, repertoires and strategies used to energise blame and guilt and thus legitimise the neoliberal policies implemented, it elaborates on the multiple functions of debt, articulating a biopolitical approach with Freudian and Lacanian theorisations of the superego. It also inscribes within this framework the current mutations in political domination.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/populism-anti-populism-and-crisis/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:10 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/populism-anti-populism-and-crisis/ Continued]]> This article focuses on two issues involved in the formation and political trajectory of populist representations within political antagonism. First, it explores the role of crisis in the articulation of populist discourse. This problematic is far from new within theories of populism but has recently taken a new turn. We thus purport to reconsider the way populism and crisis are related, mapping the different modalities this relation can take and advancing further their theorization from the point of view of a discursive theory of the political, drawing primarily on the Essex School perspective initially developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Second, this will involve focusing on the antagonistic language games developed around populist representations, something that has not attracted equal attention. Highlighting the need to study anti-populism together with populism, focusing on their mutual constitution, we will test the ensuing theoretical framework in an analysis of SYRIZA, a recent and, as a result, under-researched example of egalitarian, inclusionary populism emerging within the European crisis landscape.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-populism-anti-populism-frontier-and-its-mediation-in-crisis-ridden-greece-from-discursive-divide-to-emerging-cleavage/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:09 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/the-populism-anti-populism-frontier-and-its-mediation-in-crisis-ridden-greece-from-discursive-divide-to-emerging-cleavage/ Continued]]> Along with other South-European countries, since 2008, Greece has experienced deep economic and social dislocation, leading to a crisis of representation and triggering populist mobilisations and anti-populist reactions. This article focuses on the antagonistic language games developed around populist representations, something that has not attracted much attention in the relevant literature. Highlighting the need to study anti-populism together with populism, focusing on their mutual constitution from a discursive perspective, it articulates a brief yet comprehensive genealogy of populist and anti-populist actors (parties and media) in Greece, exploring their discursive strategies. Moving on, it identifies the main characteristics this antagonistic divide took on within the newly contested, crisis-ridden sociopolitical field, highlighting the implications for a contemporary understanding of cleavages, with potentially broader implications

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/dynamics-of-polarization-in-the-greek-case/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:07 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/dynamics-of-polarization-in-the-greek-case/ Continued]]> This article focuses on the dynamics of polarization emerging within Greek political culture in the postauthoritarian setting. Following a brief historical framing, we trace Left–Right polarization between the two major parties of the period: Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) and New Democracy (ND). The party-based polarization of PASOK/ND was arguably the main axis of political antagonism in Greece from the 1970s until the end of the 2000s. By 2009, polarization had ebbed due to an ideological convergence of the two parties toward the center, but the onset of the 2009 economic crisis dislocated the established two-party system and facilitated the emergence of a new political landscape comprising many new political actors, most notably the Coalition of the Radical Left, SYRIZA. Using a predominantly quantitative methodology, we focus on a set of dimensions of polarization brought forward or re-activated within the context of economic crisis.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/stretching-money-to-pay-the-bills-temporal-modalities-and-relational-practices-of-getting-by-in-the-greek-economic-crisis/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:01 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/stretching-money-to-pay-the-bills-temporal-modalities-and-relational-practices-of-getting-by-in-the-greek-economic-crisis/ Continued]]> This article investigates the temporalities of ‘getting by’ amidst the ripple effects of economic deterioration in Volos, Greece. Through the case of Kalypso and her family, I argue for a relational framework in the study of temporal practices, and then discuss the significant material relations of the family. Faced with less than half of their previous income, Kalypso runs a general budget pool via e-banking that allows her to coordinate the temporal constraints of periodic and everyday bills. The effect is a drifting apart of temporal experiences in the family as well as tensions about the future. Temporal agency is shown to reside in the modalities of social relations and in corresponding practices.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/austerity-discourses-in-der-spiegel-journal-2009-2014/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:54 +0000 http://arc.local/items/austerity-discourses-in-der-spiegel-journal-2009-2014/ Continued]]> This article looks at the ways mainstream media discuss austerity and its failure to reach its
proclaimed goals, to reduce public debt and to boost productivity in the heavily indebted countries of
the Eurozone’s periphery. This study analyzed Der Spiegel’s articles presenting the crisis and austerity in Europe, focusing on the Greek case, from 2009 until 2014. A thematic analysis was developed in
the study a broad corpus of articles, focusing on the main ideas they unfold. Deploying critical political
economy literature, critical cultural theory and critical media studies literature, the article criticizes the
neoliberal hegemony of the EU’s crisis politics and foregrounds the role of mainstream media, including progressivist or objectivist ones such as Spiegel, in the reproduction of neoliberal ideas that expand far beyond the crisis, to produce the institutions, social relations, beliefs and subjectivities for a
post-crisis configuration of capitalism. The article concludes that Spiegel, like other mainstream media,
produce a biopolitical policing of the crisis’ exceptionalized subjects (the citizens of indebted countries)
and the implementation of crisis-politics by creating a public “structure of feeling” related to the hegemonic crisis’ rationales. These rationales are further connected to the development of the new neoliberal subjectivity, which is an objective of the crisis-reforms, such as austerity regimes. In effect, mainstream media discourses reproduce the hegemonic frames of the

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/liberal-articulations-of-the-enlightenment-in-the-greek-public-sphere/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:54 +0000 http://arc.local/items/liberal-articulations-of-the-enlightenment-in-the-greek-public-sphere/ Continued]]> The paper analyzes ‘liberal’ constructions of the ‘Enlightenment’ in the Greek public sphere. The study is based on the analysis of articles published in two news/lifestyle websites, ‘AthensVoice’ and ‘Protagon’, during the years of the ongoing ‘Greek crisis’. Discourse theory, informed by critical discourse analysis, is deployed to analyze these discursive articulations. The analysis shows that Greece’s economic/social/political problems are viewed as symptoms that underline Greece’s fundamental deficit, which is the country’s ‘lack of ‘Enlightenment’. The article concludes that such discourses are part of a biopolitical, disciplinary framework producing the object to be reformed by austerity: a ‘un-Enlightened’ ‘Greek character’, ‘guilty’ for ‘self-inflicting’ Greece’s crisis. This ‘reform of character’ envisioned by (neo)liberals in Greece and elsewhere, is supposed to emerge through the institutional advance of neoliberal restructurings such as indefinite austerity and privatizations, conditions to foster the neoliberal, entrepreneurial, mobile and austere subject, to potentially reproduce that capitalist process.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-refugee-crisis-from-athensto-lesvos-and-back-a-dialogical-account/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:53 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-refugee-crisis-from-athensto-lesvos-and-back-a-dialogical-account/ Continued]]> Our grandparents, refugees Our parents, immigrants We, racists? 1 The slogan that prefaces the paper provides the theoretical caveat for the tensions, limitations, and contradictions of academic discourses in conjuring the daily realities of the era of the ‘refugee crisis’ in Greece. This paper has the form of a dialogue between a sociologist and photographer (Myrto) and a political theorist and activist (Anna) who investigate different forms of the ways the ‘refugee crisis’ is changing the socio-political landscapes in Greece. The multiple aspects of our identities provide valuable tools with which we unpack the multiple and contradictory narratives of researching, learning, and disseminating in the current milieu. In particular, we are interested in the ways we shape knowledge and the tension between the episte-mological and the ontological ways of knowing. In other words, by moving from theory to praxis and back, we are attempting to reconcile the problem of knowing and the problem of being part of a specific crisis milieu. For example, how can we use crisis as a research methodology? What can we learn from the ongoing ‘refugee crisis’ in relation to issues of citizenship, belonging, and the future of the European project? Furthermore, the paper attempts to transcend discursive borders between social sciences and the humanities by analysing the deeply performative, situated and embodied practices of doing research in moments of crisis. For example, how to navigate multiple, and at times contradictory, aspects of one’s identity without returning to outmoded discourses of positivism and objectivity?

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