Bücher von Nils C. Kumkar

Begriffe wie »postfaktisch« und »alternative Fakten« haben Konjunktur. Sie verweisen darauf, dass in vielen Gesellschaften ein Kampf um die Wirklichkeit der Wirklichkeit entbrannt zu sein scheint. Der Soziologe Nils C. Kumkar betrachtet diese Phänomene jedoch aus einem anderen Blickwinkel: Ausgehend von Fallstudien zu den Auseinandersetzungen um Corona, den Klimawandel und die Größe des Publikums bei der Amtseinführung Donald Trumps, plädiert er dafür, »alternative Fakten« nicht primär als Versatzstücke einer Parallelwelt zu verstehen, sondern als diskursive Nebelkerzen im Kontext polarisierter Debatten. Sie wirken, so Kumkar, nicht als Beitrag zur Konstruktion einer alternativen Realität, sondern als kommunikative Realitätsdestruktion , die es erlaubt, wider besseres Wissen weiterzumachen wie bisher.

Dieses Open-Access-Buch untersucht vor dem Hintergrund der kulturell hegemonialen Rolle der Mittelschichten in westlichen Gesellschaften sowie angesichts zeitdiagnostischer Behauptungen, dass ¿die Mitte" zunehmenden Verunsicherungen und Gefährdungen ausgesetzt sei, die biographischen Orientierungen und Praktiken, die die Lebensführung der Mittelschichten in Deutschland ausmachen.

This book analyzes the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as symptoms of the structural crisis of US capitalism and its class structure. It shows that the protests have to be understood as rooted in the petty bourgeoisie's lived experience of crisis, which also plays a crucial role in current political developments like the successful presidential campaign of Donald Trump. The book explains the Great Recession as an acute phase of the structural crisis of the finance-dominated accumulation regime, identifies the social classes from which the core-participants of the respective protests recruited themselves and the socioeconomic developments to which they were exposed in the years leading up to the protests, and interprets interviews and group discussions conducted with activists to reconstruct the habitus that structured both their experience of the crisis and their resonance with the respective protest practices. It thereby provides an encompassing understanding of the social logics not only of these social movements, but of the current political conjuncture in the US.

This book analyzes the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street as symptoms of the structural crisis of US capitalism and its class structure. It shows that the protests have to be understood as rooted in the petty bourgeoisie¿s lived experience of crisis, which also plays a crucial role in current political developments like the successful presidential campaign of Donald Trump. The book explains the Great Recession as an acute phase of the structural crisis of the finance-dominated accumulation regime, identifies the social classes from which the core-participants of the respective protests recruited themselves and the socioeconomic developments to which they were exposed in the years leading up to the protests, and interprets interviews and group discussions conducted with activists to reconstruct the habitus that structured both their experience of the crisis and their resonance with the respective protest practices. It thereby provides an encompassing understanding of the social logics not only of these social movements, but of the current political conjuncture in the US.