Julius Rogenhofer, Dialogical Cultures Junior Fellow
Julius is the Dialogical Cultures Junior Fellow at KU Eichstätt. Before coming to Eichstätt, Julius completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge (Jesus College) and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Sociological Research at KU Leuven. His research focuses on questions of order and political action in social theory. Currently he is investigating the significance of various emotive mechanisms that mediate between social structure and political outcomes as well as the role of material culture in contentious politics. Julius has published in journals including Constellations, Democratization, the American Behavioural Scientist and Contemporary Pragmatism.
Project at KU CAS: The Politics of Ordinary Objects
What explains the success of some political struggles for rights, power, and resources over others? My current research suggests that the answer to this fundamental question of political life cannot be reduced solely to the people involved, the ideas they develop, and the words uttered in their interactions. Just as every murder mystery involves a crime scene and a murder weapon, so too should our studies of contemporary politics take into consideration objects and their associated practices, not to replace motive and culprits, but as their necessary complement. Together with the Cambridge social theorist Filipe Carreira da Silva I explore the significance of five seemingly everyday artefacts and one imagined item (the microchip in many Covid-19 conspiracy theories) in the most significant political contests of our time. I analyse how the red MAGA cap, the umbrellas of Hong Kong’s student protesters and Elina Chauvet’s red shoes (amongst other things) were elevated through interactions of their material properties with practices of appropriation and reception into political icons. By combining the study of practices, discourses, and emotions with a focus on material culture, our forthcoming manuscript offers fresh interpretations of populism, anti-authoritarian struggles and conspiracy thinking. Challenging poststructuralist and strictly materialist interpretations of politics alike, it develops a pragmatic theory of political icons and material agency and contributes fresh thinking on the interaction of the material and ideational worlds.