Now-Time, Us-Space: Hegemonic Mobilisations in Central and Eastern Europe

Now-Time Us-Space is an international research project funded by Kone Foundation for 2021-24, at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. Political science, philosophy and geography collaborate on spatial-temporal basis of populism.

The project’s aim is to study hegemonic mobilisations through the politics of time and space in Central and Eastern Europe. Our work is funded by the Kone Foundation in 2020-24 (PI Emilia Palonen).

The aim of the project is to develop tools to disentangle populism as a hegemonic or hegemony-challenging force and the underpinnings of its affective practices. We focus on an under-explored question in populism research: how spaces interact in the making of a collective subjectivity. We research HOW, WHEN, and WHERE contemporary forms of us-building emerge. The project is a multi-sited research and rhetoric-performative analysis of mainly physical but also virtual place-making and populism across Europe. We investigate contemporary politics of memory and space in Central and Eastern Europe: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Kosovo, and the Eastern länder of Germany.