Geoscience Colloquium on July 15 — Rural Populism: The Case of Lusatia

As part of the Geosciences Colloquium organized by the Department of Geosciences at TU Dresden, Paul Nguyễn and Dr. Frank Meyer—both Research Associates at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL) in Leipzig, will give a public lecture on July 15 at 4:45 p.m. in Lecture Hall HÜL/S186 in the Hülße Building at TU Dresden. The lecture will address the following topic:

“Degenerate Urbanity” and “Healthy Rural Idyll”—Rural Populism as Exemplified by Lusatia

... this stark contrast is not an analytical judgment, but rather the very subject of the investigation: it encapsulates a spatially-based semantics that repeatedly exerts influence in populist discourse. Since the identification of a “populist zeitgeist” (Mudde 2004), research on populism has diversified significantly. In recent years, the spatial dimension—specifically the interplay between populism and rurality—has gained particular importance. While this connection—for example, between populist electoral successes and the degree of rurality—has been statistically measured on numerous occasions, there have so far been only isolated attempts to understand the relationship between populism and rurality from a social constructivist and discourse-theoretical perspective. As a result, it is often overlooked that “rurality” itself is both the subject and the effect of political struggles over meaning.

This presentation provides a brief overview of the current state of research on rural populism and, using the example of Lusatia, examines in greater detail how rurality is (re)constructed in populist discourses and antagonistically pitted against other spatial constructions in a “people versus elite” dichotomy. Lusatia is not just any random case study: where transformation processes—such as the coal phase-out and structural change, are presented to the region as calls for transformation, the “healthy rural idyll” becomes a discursive resource through which such calls can be interpreted and rejected as externally imposed impositions “from above” or “from outside.” This highlights how closely populist constructions of rurality are interwoven with the negotiation of transformation processes.