Living Populism: Polarization and Quotidian Experience

Project Information

LPPQE

Grant agreement ID: 101104011

DOI

10.3030/101104011

Project closed

EC signature date 24 April 2023

Start date 1 July 2023

End date 30 June 2025

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 188 174,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITE LIBRE DE BRUXELLES
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LPPQE (Living Populism: Polarization and Quotidian Experience)

Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

This research aims to provide fundamental knowledge regarding how everyday experiences of housing insecurity may foment populist political commitments. Despite the growing influence of populist movements globally, the phenomenon has garnered little attention in anthropology; the few anthropological accounts that do discuss populism in depth rarely do so through long-term socially embedded ethnography. More common are accounts that rely upon methodologies developed in political science, and rely upon analysis of populist leaders’ discourse. By eschewing anthropology’s hallmark methodology of ethnography, analysts fail to gather data on the lifeworlds of populists, and fail to grasp the broader processes of populist subjectivation and experience.
Through ‘Living Populism: Polarisation and Quotidian Experience’ (LPPQE) I will move past the discursive reduction of populism to examine how populist commitments are made through everyday experience – in particular though looking to how tenants’ experiences of navigating housing conflicts in Madrid, Spain, lead to populist understandings of the political landscape.
This research will have both academic and societal impacts. A more ethnographically grounded approach than has so far been taken by many theorists of populism, which explores the domestic lives of populist supporters will, I suggest, offer far deeper and more nuanced insights regarding the phenomenon. By adopting this methodology, I will help set the standard for how anthropologists study populism in the future. Even beyond the emerging anthropology of populism, anthropologists and other social scientists will increasingly have to account for populist politics due to the continuing political importance of the phenomenon. The results of this project will enrich anthropological research writ large. Much as neoliberalism has become a pervasive topic explored in a wide range of anthropological subfields, populism too will become an issue that many anthropologists will need to deal with, regardless of the theme that they are investigating.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

I have undertaken 18 months of fieldwork in Spain with members of a tenants' rights union, studying how experiences of housing insecurity give rise to populist epistemologies. In that time I have attended dozens of 'assemblies' in which tenants collectively assess their conflicts, and discuss the reasons behind housing insecurity and strategies to overcome this experience. I have also followed numerous cases as they have developed, conducted over 20 interviews with tenants, participated in housing activism, and accompanied my interlocutors through Spanish state bureaucracy as they attempted to find viable long term housing solutions.

This data collection has enabled me to commence drafting academic papers that discuss Spanish populism and housing insecurity. I will shortly submit these papers to top tier journals in anthropology and political theory.

I have also used my tenure as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow to finalise a related research project - and have recently published a journal article in Critique of Anthropology discussing the embodied politics of populism and antipopulism.

I collaborated with my supervisor, combining our research interests, to run an international academic conference at the ULB. This event (which combined my interest in domestic objects as catalysts for political commitments with my supervisor's interest in alternative food production) discussed the politics of alternative food movements, and was attended by scholars from Europe, Australia, the UK, North America and Asia.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

With this research I have moved beyond the state of the art, by exploring relations between left-wing populism and housing insecurity. Although there is an acknowledgement of the importance in struggles against abusive landlords and unfair housing systems in historical populist movements - in particular those that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century United States - the little academic work that discusses contemporary links between populism and housing struggles does so through examining right-wing populist movements. This ethnographic focus has further allowed me to explore issues that go beyond current debates. Where the nascent anthropology of populism has, so far, largely concerned itself with questions of mobilisation, my data speaks instead to populist experience. An analysis of experience offers the prospect of understanding populism not as a neatly circumscribed aspect of subjects' political thought, but instead as a more broad ranging set of commitments and epistemologies that result from diverse and unpredictable forms of social action.

Although I have gathered extensive data, this is in spite of events outside of my control drastically impacting my research. Initially this project was intended to be carried out among supporters and members of the Spanish left-populist party 'Podemos.' Between the approval of my grant application and the start of my data gathering period, Podemos suffered a historical electoral defeat, turning them from the minor party in a nationally governing coalition to a fringe party. Previous contacts I had gathered lost jobs, and moved out of politics. Under these conditions it was impossible to conduct my planned research, and I pivoted to studying similar topics of experience and left-populism, but doing so through working with a tenants' rights union. Making this change possible took significant time and work. As such, I was not able to gather as socially rich ethnographic data as I had hoped, and believe that further research is needed.

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