Communities as niches for establishing and testing social practices
Researcher: Dr. Jędrzej Sulmowski
Head: Prof. Dr. Thomas Alkemeyer
Social transformations do not happen by themselves, but have to be ‘made’. From a practical-theoretical perspective, they depend above all on whether people’s everyday practice changes. However, everyday actions are largely beyond the control and influence of individuals. Rather, they are conditioned by infrastructures and social practices that are so familiar to us that we have settled into them as if we were in a familiar home. These familiar environments and habits include, for example, historically developed and economically instrumented forms and ways of living and eating, food supply and disposal, personal hygiene and work, mobility and leisure behaviour. Most practices of everyday life have become so well-rehearsed and taken for granted that they are hardly ever questioned. However, there are exceptions: At least some of the lifestyles considered normal in the societies of the Global North have been increasingly problematised and questioned over the last five decades in terms of their social and ecological costs. Collective and individual actors – trans- and supranational organisations, state institutions, civil society organisations, individual activists – have been publicly advocating a change in these lifestyles ever since. Some of them are focusing on changes in individual behaviour, for example in consumption; others are aiming at the establishment of infrastructures and practices that promise to enable a resource-saving, greenhouse gas-reducing, integrative, and just life.
The subproject illuminates precisely this area of tension: It ethnographically focuses on collaborative initiatives which, according to their self-understanding, oppose resource-wasting, emission-intensive, and/or market-mediated practices. It is interested in three questions: First, it examines the extent to which these initiatives form niches of an alternative life, which in turn develops its own (niche-) normality for its inhabitants. Secondly, it will be investigated what conditions – regarding the socio-demographic composition of the group, the organisation of work, the decision-making, the regulation of entry and exit, institutional ties, the political or ideological orientation, etc. – are required in order to live an alternative normality. And thirdly, we ask what significance the recourse to semantics and lifeforms of community has for being able to establish, stabilise, and spread alternative practices in the first place – and to what extent these practices in turn condition the self-understanding of being a community.
By answering these questions, the subproject contributes to shedding light on the opportunities, limits, and concomitants of a transformation through initiatives that understand themselves as communities. This is particularly relevant against the background of the diagnosis of the times, which states that informal ‘community policies’ would increasingly compensate for the erosion of state social and environmental policies. In the light of this diagnosis, communitarian bottom-up initiatives appear not only as drafts of an alternative normality, but also as players in a state top-down agenda of transformation.
