Two new studies by researchers from the Chair of Human Geography have been published

In November, Research Associates from the Chair of Human Geography published two new studies.

The article Between #Mädelbund and #Ostmullen – Making sense of everyday territorializations of far-right women on German TikTok by Michael Krell and Peter Rothe examines the mobilization practices of far-right female influencers on the short-form video platform TikTok. Based on a multimodal analysis of a series of videos, the article traces how misanthropic content is conveyed through the construction of exclusionary spatial concepts—via the apparent contradiction of young women who present themselves visually in a harmless manner. As a result, the authors also demonstrate how two new types of female content creators have emerged in the far-right German TikTok universe, introduced as #Mädelbund and #Ostmullen. The article has been published as open access in English in the international journal Digital Geography and Society.

In addition, Michael Krell’s academic article titled Far-Right Local Politics as a Practice of Territorialization: Empirical Findings Based on the Example of Freie Sachsen. It examines the local political practices of the neo-Nazi minor party “Freie Sachsen” since it first entered Saxon local councils in 2024. Using an analysis of digital and analog data, the study traces how the party navigates the contradiction between its self-image as an anti-establishment force on its online channels and its local work in municipal councils, where it has predominantly participated in consensus-oriented voting. This article argues that this behavior should be interpreted as a hybrid performative practice of territorialization under the conditions of local concordance democracies, which serves to weaken democratic stakeholders at the local level, but at the same time maintains the potential for a radical right-wing normalization through its everyday portrayal as a party of reasonable, pragmatic politics. The article was published as open access in the journal Geographica Helvetica.