I currently work on this project:

Germans from an immigrant background and how they perceive of symbolic boundaries

In this project, I conduct interviews with three groups of Germans from an immigrant background: Germans of Polish descent, Germans of Turkish descent and black Germans. I am interested in how they perceive of the boundaries between them (and their groups) and the German majority population. In so doing, I aim at exploring the dimensions and the significance of cultural membership (given that all interviewees hold German citizenship). An important aspect of this project will be the question of how my interviewees cope with perceived discrimination and stigmatization. In specific, I am interested in the cultural resources (religion, emotions, law, specific frames and discourses) they have at their disposition to cope with symbolic boundaries. I also want to investigate the factors that play a crucial role with regard to what resources they actually have access to and put to use (media, social networks, social positions). The project is comparative and aims at contributing to debates in the fields of cultural sociology, migration and citizenship studies and the sociology of emotion.


Projects I have been working on in the past decade (2008-2018):

1. German national identity discourse since the 1980s (project duration: 2008-2012)

In my PhD thesis, I analyzed public debates on national identity in Germany (as, for instance, the Historians’ Debate, the Reunification Debate and the debate about a German ‘Leitkultur’). Tracing discursive shifts, I explored how key notions have changed regarding German nationhood, the significance of the Nazi period for today’s understanding of nationhood and concepts such as patriotism. A central finding of my work is that the traditional notion of a German Kulturnation has been gradually delegitimized and substituted by the idea of a pluralistic nation. This change was embedded in changes with regard to how the Nazi period is regarded and put to use as an argumentative resource and had significant consequences for ideas about whether taking pride in one’s nation is legitimate. Moreover, I interpreted the changes I observed as induced by what John W. Meyer has called ‘world culture’.

Publications from this project:
Piwoni, Eunike. 2012. Nationale Identität im Wandel. Deutscher Intellektuellendiskurs zwischen Tradition und Weltkultur [National Identity Change. German Intellectual Discourse In-between Tradition and World Culture]. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag
Piwoni, Eunike. 2013. "Latent but Not Less Powerful: The Holocaust as an Argumentative Resource in German National Identity Discourse". German Politics & Society 31(3), 1-26. doi: 10.3167/gps.2013.310301
Piwoni, Eunike. 2017. „Ein deutsches Jahrzehnt? Der deutsche Identitätsdiskurs als ein Happy End unter Vorbehalt" [A German Decade? German National Identity Discourse as a Happy End Under Reverse]. Indes 6(3), 83-92. doi: 10.13109/inde.2017.6.3.83


2. Online newspapers’ comment sections as counterpublic spaces (project duration: 2013-2017)

In a collaborative project with Florian Töpfl (FU Berlin) we have investigated the significance of online newspapers’ comment sections. Specifically, we analyzed all articles about the AfD on 9 news websites in the week following the 2013 Bundestag elections (n = 22) and conducted a content analysis of all comments posted below these articles (n = 3,154). It is the first study that empirically shows that comment sections on news websites offer counterpublic spaces. However, the counterpublics that emerge in these spaces are shaped by mainstream discourse. In specific, we were able to show that the counterpublic aligned its efforts closely with the dominant public by adopting central frames from mainstream discourse.

Publications from this project:
Toepfl, Florian and Piwoni, Eunike. 2015. "Public Spheres in Interaction: Comment Sections of News Websites as Counterpublic Spaces". Journal of Communication 65(3), 465-488. doi: 10.1111/jcom.12156
Toepfl, Florian and Piwoni, Eunike. 2017. "Targeting dominant publics: How counterpublic commenters align their efforts with mainstream news". New Media & Society. Online First. doi: 10.1177/1461444817712085


3. Cosmopolitanism and young elites (project duration: 2013-2018)

Awarded with a postdoctoral fellowship from the German Research Foundation, I conducted 24 interviews with students at London School of Economics (LSE). The goal was to explore their identities as cosmopolitans and to understand how elite students put cosmopolitanism as a cultural resource to use in their daily lives. I was also interested in the narratives they develop when reasoning upon their lives as adults and their future careers and in how they made sense of different entities at the global, national, and local levels. In contrast to dominant descriptions of elite cosmopolitans that have tended to presuppose an individualised self, I found that young elite cosmopolitans made sense of their identities as embedded in relationships with family and kin.

Publications from this project:
Piwoni, Eunike. 2014. "Myria Georgiou: Media and the City: Cosmopolitanism and Difference". Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture 5(1), 179-181
Piwoni, Eunike. 2018b. “Exploring Disjuncture: Elite Students’ Use of Cosmopolitanism”. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. Online First


4. The construction of symbolic boundaries in public discourse about immigrant integration (project duration: 2013-2018)

In this project, which has been partly funded by the Step-by-Step-Programme (Bamberg University), I studied one of the most outstanding German public debates about immigrant integration—the Sarrazin debate. Specifically, I was interested in the processes by which boundaries have been constructed and modified. Firstly, I drew on Michael Saward’s theory of representation. In so doing, I could show that the debate’s course was significantly changed from the moment on when Sarrazin was regarded as representing ordinary people’s opinions and emotions. I was thus able to point out how elites and ordinary people may interact in the construction of boundaries.
More than that, I found that the Sarrazin debate was characterized by an intense discourse on emotion by which different set of ‘feeling rules’ (Arlie R. Hochschild) were conveyed for autochthonous Germans on the one hand and Germans from Muslim-majority countries on the other hand. While autochthonous Germans were generally not asked to control their Angst, there was a tendency to ask immigrants from Muslim-majority countries to hold back their feelings. I interpreted this pattern as an unequal distribution of recognition and as an instance by which symbolic boundaries were stabilized.

Publications from this project:
Piwoni, Eunike. 2015. "Claiming the nation for the people: the dynamics of representation in German public discourse about immigrant integration". Nations and Nationalism, 21(1), 83-101. doi: 10.1111/nana.12084
Piwoni, Eunike. 2018a. "Mass-Mediated Discourse on Emotion and the Feeling Rules it Conveys: The Case of the Sarrazin Debate". Current Sociology. Online First. doi: 10.1177/0011392117751574