Vortrag
Who is “Us” and “Them” in the Climate Crisis? A Comparative Sociological View on Austria and Slovakia

In the Horizon project CIDAPE, we conceptualize the varying social bases of climate and inequality emotions through what we call everyday “climate boundaries”. This concept foregrounds the relational dimension of how people view and feel about daily practices in work, consumption, and mobility in the context of the climate crisis. By articulating climate boundaries, people construct a sense of “us” and “them”, determining who belongs to the “in-group” and who is excluded on affective grounds. Our work is based on a comparative study of four societies – Norway, Slovakia, Austria, and Spain. In this presentation, I will present preliminary insights into the comparison of Austria and Slovakia. Studying these two cases allows to ask: How do historical as well as contemporary East/West divides in Europe shape everyday orientations to the challenges of the climate crisis and the ways in which people feel about, and cope with, society’s response to it? By studying these questions in a relational perspective, we aim to gain a better understanding of the on-the-ground realities of social polarization.

Till Hilmar received his PhD in sociology from Yale University in 2019 and is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology, Vienna University. He is a faculty fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology and an assistant editor of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. His research interests include qualitative approaches to inequality, cultural and political sociology, social memory, post-1989 transformations, and text-as-data. He is interested in popular ideas about economic inequality and is developing methodological approaches to understand cultural narratives about economic change.ng March 2024, he is a PI in the Horizon Project CIDAPE on inequality, climate change and the force of political emotions.

His book Deserved. Economic Memories after the Fall of the Iron Curtain, published with Columbia University Press in 2023, examines popular experiences of the East German and the Czech post-1989 transformations in a comparative perspective.

The talk is part of the HAIT Lecture Series Lost (in) Transformation: Answers from the Recent Past to Challenges of Today in the winter semester. Manuela Beyer will moderate the talk.

The Lecture Series takes place in TIL 110 and hybrid via Zoom.

If you would like to attend, please register by the Monday before the event at: hait@tu-dresden.de, stating your full name. The registration link will be sent to you separately a few days before the start of the event.

Diese Maßnahme ist mitfinanziert durch Steuermittel auf Grundlage des vom Sächsischen Landtag beschlossenen Haushalts.