Dr. Eunike Piwoni

Dr. Eunike Piwoni
Phone: +49(0)851/509-2689
Fax: +49(0)851/509-2602
E-mail: eunike.piwoni@uni-passau.de

Room: HK14b 213
Dr.-Hans-Kapfinger-Straße 14 B
94032 Passau

Project

From April 2022 onwards Dr. Eunike Piwoni will work on her DFG Project.

The Affective and Emotional Dimensions and Dynamics of (Non-) Belonging and Experiencing Ethnoracial Exclusion—A Comparison of Three Groups of Germans of Migrant Background

Cultural sociologists and scholars of migration have increasingly focused on immigrants’ experiences of ethnoracial exclusion such as stigmatization and (perceived) discrimination. Firstly, they have pointed out the consequences of experiences of exclusion (such as reactive identity or a lower level of identification with the host country); secondly, they have described the spectrum and variety of strategies that excluded groups may use; and, thirdly, they have started to compare across country contexts. However, there remain at least three significant gaps in the literature. This project addresses these three gaps by asking the following research questions: What are the affective and emotional dimensions of individuals’ and groups’ perceptions of symbolic boundaries and, especially, their experiences of stigmatization and (perceived) discrimination? How do individuals’ and groups’ perceptions of symbolic boundaries and their experiences of exclusion relate to their feelings of (non-)belonging to different entities? How can we explain differences between various groups and sub-groups with regard to their perceptions of symbolic boundaries, their experiences of exclusion, their responses to these experiences, and their feelings of (non-)belonging? To answer these questions, the project draws on a range of theoretical concepts such as boundaries, stigmatization and (perceived) discrimination, and (non-) belonging but also affect and emotion, emotion repertoires, emotional reflexivity, emotion work and feeling rules. Empirically, the project focuses on Germany as a case and collects data through focus group interviews, individual interviews, and audio diaries with three ‘groups’ of German citizens: (1) Germans of Turkish origin, (2) Germans of Polish origin, and (3) Black Germans. Data will be generated on the individual, the interactional, and the group level. The project’s findings will advance international academic debates in cultural sociology and migration studies in three ways. First, the project will introduce an emotional sociological perspective to how experiences of exclusion are currently debated by systematically accounting for the affective and emotional dynamics implicated in how individuals and groups experience symbolic boundaries and exclusion. This perspective is highly relevant since it enables us to get a handle on what is at the very core of experiences of exclusion—affects and emotions. Second, the project will push forward the debate on the significance of perceived discrimination and stigmatization for immigrant integration by analysing the variety of ways by which symbolic boundaries, experiences of exclusion, and feelings of (non-)belonging may be intertwined. Third, the project will advance our understanding of the various factors that influence (sub-)groups making sense of symbolic boundaries and experiences of exclusion, their repertoires of responses to these experiences, and their feelings of (non-)belonging.

Lectures and Seminars

Wintersemester 2021/22

For more details please click here.

Main Focus

Political Sociology
Cultural Sociology
Sociology of Migration
Sociology of Emotions
Qualitative Social Research

Education

From 02/2020	Lecturer (Akademische Rätin) at Passau University, Chair of Sociology
10/2014 – 01/2020	Lecturer (Akademische Rätin auf Zeit) at Göttingen University, Institute of Sociology, Göttingen, Germany (Department III Cultural Sociology, Professor Matthias Koenig), from 08/2015-12/2016 on Maternity Leave (https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/494650.html)
01/2014 – 09/2014	Research Fellow of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in London, UK (Affiliated with Monika Krause, PhD, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London)
01/2012 – 09/2014	Lecturer (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at Bamberg University, Department of Social Sciences, Bamberg, Germany (Chair for Sociological Theory and Comparative Macrosociology, Professor Richard Münch), from 04/2012 – 09/2014 on Maternity Leave (www.uni-bamberg.de/en/soz2/)
08/2007 – 03/2008	Research Associate (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at Passau University, Department of Philosophy, Passau, Germany (Chair for Sociology, Professor Maurizio Bach).

Non-Academic Professional Experience

04/2011 – 12/2011	Project Officer at Eurice (European Research and Project Office), Saarbrücken, Germany. Coordination and Administration of EU Funded Research Projects (FP7). (www.eurice.eu)
10/2005 – 09/2007	Manager of ”Perspektive Osteuropa [Eastern European Chances]” at Passau University, Germany. Conceptualization, Organization and Realization of Public Events Focusing on Eastern Europe. (www.uni-passau.de/perspektive-osteuropa)

Fellowships, Awards, and Grants

2014-2015	Postdoctoral Research Stipend by the German Research Foundation (DFG) for a Research Stay in London, UK. Awarded full stipend for the duration of 12 months with possibility of extension (39.816 respectively 79.632 Euro).
2009/2010	Foreign Exchange Scholarship of the German Research Foundation (DFG) for a Research Stay at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University New York. Awarded full stipend for the duration of nine months (top up of 11.700 Euro on the doctoral fellowship).
2008-2011	Doctoral Fellowship of the German Research Foundation (DFG). Awarded full stipend based on academic merit and quality of the research proposal for the duration of three years (39.708 Euro).
2006	Fellowship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Awarded full tuition reimbursement and stipend for participation in the summer school ‘Ukrainian Culture and Language’ at Ivan-Franko-University, Lviv, Ukraine.
2003	Fellowship of the Socrates Comenius Program. Awarded stipend for a 3-month social work project with disabled pupils at a primary school in Racibórz, Poland.
2002-2003	Fellowship of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Awarded full tuition reimbursement and stipend for a semester abroad in Poznań, Poland based on academic merit for the duration of six months.

Book

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.

Journal Articles (* peer reviewed; **SSCI-ranked)

in production, 2024**	“’Where are you from?’ The affective and emotional dimensions of an ambiguous incident of everyday racism.” In Emotions and Society. Online First.
2024**	“Comprehending and sensing racism: how Germans of migrant background make sense of experiences of ethnoracial exclusion.” In Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Online First. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2024.2316635
2023**	(with Marlene Mußotter) “The evolution of the civic-ethnic distinction as a partial success story: Lessons for the nationalism-patriotism distinction.” In Nations and Nationalism. Online First. doi: 10.1111/nana.12944
2022**	"Improving the study of responses to experiences of ethnoracial exclusion—a heuristic for comparative qualitative research" In Ethnic and Racial Studies. Online First. doi: 10.1080/01419870.2022.2059386
2020**	“Exploring Disjuncture: Elite Students’ Use of Cosmopolitanism”. In Identities, 27(2), 173-190. doi: 10.1080/1070289X.2018.1441691
2020**	"Mass-Mediated Discourse on Emotion and the Feeling Rules it Conveys: The Case of the Sarrazin Debate". In Current Sociology 68(3), 390-407. doi: 10.1177/0011392117751574
2019**	“Giving Back to the World, the Nation, and the Family: Young Elite Cosmopolitans and Their Notions of Solidarity”. In Young. Online First. doi: 10.1177/1103308818817633
2018**	(with Florian Töpfl) "Targeting dominant publics: How counterpublic commenters align their efforts with mainstream news". In New Media & Society 20(5), 2011-2027.
2015**	(with Florian Töpfl) "Public Spheres in Interaction: Comment Sections of News Websites as Counterpublic Spaces". In Journal of Communication 65(3), 465-488.
2015**	“Claiming the Nation for the People. The Dynamics of Representative Claim-Making in Public Discourse about National Identity and Integration”. In Nations & Nationalism. 21(1), 83-101.
2013*	“Latent but Not Less Powerful: The Holocaust as an Argumentative Resource in German National Identity Discourse”. In German Politics & Society 31(3), 1-26.

Other Publications

2017

Journal Article: "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]". In Indes 6(3), 83-92.

2009

Book Chapter: “Zu den Voraussetzungen kultureller Grenzüberschreitung. Die Briefe der Ermländerin Marta Hermanowska aus den Jahren 1945-1952 in der Perspektive von Alfred Schütz' Überlegungen zum Fremden [Crossing Cultural Borders. The Letters of Marta Hermanowska from 1945-1952 in the Perspective of Alfred Schütz’ Essay on the Alien]”. In D. Gräf & V. Schmöller (Eds.), Grenzen. Konstruktionen und Bedeutungen (pp. 87-110). Passau: Verlag Karl Stutz.

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie & Sozialpsychologie, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

New Media & Society, International Sociology, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), French National Research Agency (ANR)

Ongoing (from 2018): The perception of symbolic borders by Germans with migration background

Within the framework of this project I conduct interviews with three groups of "Germans with a migration background": Germans with Polish background, Germans with Turkish background and black Germans. I am interested in whether, despite their German citizenship (and thus formal membership), they perceive symbolic boundaries between their groups and "the Germans" and how they deal with them. The central question here is what answers they develop when they are discriminated against or stigmatized. In this context I am also and above all interested in the cultural resources (specific discourses and patterns of interpretation, but also emotions, religion and law) that are available to them in dealing with symbolic boundaries (or perceived discrimination and stigmatization) and the factors that influence access to these resources (media, networks, social positions). The project is comparative in nature and ties in with debates on emotional sociology, migration sociology and cultural sociology.

Finished Projects

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

Within my doctoral thesis, I dealt with central debates on German national identity (including the Historians' Controversy, the unification debate and the Leitkultur debate) and examined how central ideas about what the German nation is and who legitimately belongs to it, how one should behave towards it and what significance the Nazi era should have for the present, changed. A central result of the work is that the traditional idea of a culturally and ethnically constituted German nation has been replaced by a pluralistic understanding of the nation and that this change has been accompanied by a renegotiated consensus on how to deal with the Nazi era. Furthermore, the change in the German understanding of the nation had important consequences with regard to the legitimacy of national pride and patriotism. Furthermore, I argue that this multidimensional change can be interpreted as the effect of "world culture" (John W. Meyer).
Publications from this project are:
Piwoni, Eunike. 2012. "Nationale Identität im Wandel. Deutscher Intellektuellendiskurs zwischen Tradition und Weltkultur". 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". Indes 6(3), 83-92. doi: 10.13109/inde.2017.6.3.83

2. Online comment sections as spaces for counter-publicity (project period: 2013-2017)

In a joint project with Florian Töpfl (FU Berlin), I did research on the comment sections of online newspapers. Specifically, we investigated the week after the penultimate federal election (2013), in which the AfD narrowly missed its entry into parliament, and collected both the coverage of opinion-leading online newspapers on this event and all comments posted under the articles listed below. With our study, we were able to show empirically for the first time that counter-publics are forming in the commentary sections of online newspapers. Nevertheless, these counter-publics are shaped by the structures of the debate in opinion-leading newspapers, as central frames are taken over. For this project, I co-developed the theoretical framework, created the codebook and coded the data (22 articles, 3154 comments).
Publications from this project are:
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 period: 2013-2018)

As part of a postdoctoral fellowship (DFG), I conducted interviews with international students at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2014 about their self-image as cosmopolitans. The aim of the project was to understand how they use the dominant (and at the same time elitist) cosmopolitan Leitkultur at a university like the LSE as a resource for their everyday life and what paradoxes arise in this context. I was also interested in the narratives they develop when they argue about where they want to work and live after graduation and the role they assign to national and local affinities. A rather surprising result, against the background of current debates on the phenomenon of elite cosmopolitanism, was the central importance these young elites attach to their nuclear family.
Publications from this project are:
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 the public discourse on the integration of immigrants (project period: 2013-2018)

In a project partly funded by the Women's Fund of the University of Bamberg, I examined the Sarrazin debate with a view to the question of how boundaries were constructed and modified in this debate. On the one hand, I took a representational theory perspective, which enabled me to show that a central moment within the debate was the perception of Sarrazin as the "voice of the people". This significantly influenced the course of the debate. I was thus able to show a mechanism by which elites and "the common people" jointly construct boundaries.

Furthermore, the Sarrazin debate was characterized by a discourse on emotions that established different "Feeling Rules" for "autochthonous Germans" on the one hand and "Germans with a Muslim background" on the other: Germans were allowed to have emotions, while Germans with a migration background were asked to control their emotions. The argument I am developing in the case of the Sarrazin debate is therefore that "Feeling Rules" are spread through public discourse, which stabilize symbolic boundaries and distribute recognition unequally.
Publications from this project are:
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

Chair of Sociology