Prof. Dr. Emilija Gagrčin (University of Bremen) Anticipating and preempting polarisation: Ethnographic perspectives on democratic resilience as a communicative process in local wind energy conflicts

• 24.06.2026
• 16:15 Clock
• Linzer Str. 4 • Room 60.070

The invitation to the event with the abstract of the lecture and more information about Prof. Dr. Emilija Gagrčin can be found here.

Abstract

Democratic resilience has so far been studied predominantly through quantitative approaches in media and communication research, conceptualized as a measurable property of individuals, media systems, or political systems. This talk takes an ethnographic approach, foregrounding the situated and relational dimensions of democratic resilience. 

The empirical basis is ongoing ethnographic research on wind energy development in Baden-Württemberg. Wind power expansion makes for a particularly productive research context because it encompasses multiple societal fault lines: spatial identity (urban/rural), distributive justice (local costs vs. national gains), and cultural-political antagonisms (climate protection vs. Heimat), the latter of which is increasingly exploited by right-wing populist networks for political mobilization. Baden-Württemberg thus offers a revealing setting in which to examine destructive polarization as a communicative process unfolding around a concrete local issue. 

Preliminary findings reveal how actors across institutional actors, civil society, and local residents anticipate destructive polarization and develop their own strategies for upholding communicative conditions for legitimate conflict. The talk introduces the concept of anticipatory democratic resilience to make sense of these practices, and, in doing so, pushes toward a more process-oriented understanding of democratic resilience in media and communication research. 

Bio 

Dr. Emilija Gagrčin is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies with a focus on Media, Society and the Good Life at ZeMKI, University of Bremen, where she leads the GLaMS Lab (Good Life & Media Society). Her research examines the social, normative, and infrastructural conditions that shape people’s relationship to society amid processes of social change. Previously, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bergen (Norway), where she conducted a project on democratic resilience in the context of local energy conflicts. She holds a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin / Weizenbaum Institut. She also serves as Chair of the YECREA – Young Scholars Network of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA). 

More information about the research colloqium.