Julia Leser – författare

Affective Policing provides an in-depth exploration of police raids in the sex industry in Germany and how police officers navigate these events by mobilizing affects such as compassion, suspicion, disgust, and frustration. Although raids are officially justified as measures to identify and protect victims of human trafficking, such victims are largely absent in everyday policing practice. Instead, raids operate as a moral and epistemic technology that targets migrant sex workers, reproducing older regimes of vice control under the language of humanitarian concern. Based on extensive fieldwork with a vice squad police department and on routine police raids—riding along in unmarked cars, entering brothels and private apartments, observing encounters between officers and sex workers in the local red-light district—Julia Leser reveals how sex work and human trafficking are governed through affects. By connecting police ethnography with affect theory, Affective Policing uncovers the constitution, withdrawal, and (un)ungovernability of subjects in the everyday practice of police officers. It contemplates how 'the state' feels for its subjects and affects the governance of marginalized populations.

Across Eastern Germany, where political allegiances are shifting to the right, the wolf is increasingly seen as a trespasser and threat to the local way of life. Styled by populist right-wing actors as an ‘invasive species’, the wolf evokes and resonates with anti-immigration sentiments and widespread fears of demographic catastrophe. To many people in Eastern Germany, the immigrant and the wolf are an indistinguishable problem that nobody in power is doing anything about. In this account of Eastern German agitation of wolves and migrants, Eastern German hunters, farmers, rioters and self-appointed 'saviours of the nation', Pates and Leser move beyond stereotypic representations of ‘the East’ and shine a light on the complexities of post-socialist life and losses.As nationalist parties are on the rise across Europe, The wolves are coming back offers an insight into the rise of the far right in Germany. The nationalist Alternative for Germany represents the third-largest party in the German federal parliament, with representation in the vast majority of German states. They draw much of their support from the ‘post-traumatic places’ in Eastern Germany, regions structured by realities of disownment, disenfranchisement and a lack of democratic infrastructure. Pates and Leser provide an account of the societal roots of a new group of radical right parties, whose existence and success we always assumed to be impossible.

Dieses Buch befasst sich mit einem drängenden Problem, das auch in Deutschland virulent ist: der Wiederkehr populistischer Nationalismen und migrationsfeindlicher Einstellungen. Der Band untersucht, wie sich Vorstellungen kollektiver Identität in der deutschen Gesellschaft in Zeiten von Migration und Pluralisierung gestalten – besonders angesichts der wachsenden Ablehnung, die sich im Zusammenhang mit rechtspopulistischen Wahlerfolgen in Deutschland und darüber hinaus zeigt. Zum einen fasst der Band Forschungsergebnisse aus Gruppendiskussionen und ethnografischen Studien in Berlin, Sachsen, Schleswig-Holstein und Thüringen zusammen, die die Funktionen nationaler Narrative in Zeiten gesellschaftlicher Umbrüche beleuchten. Zum anderen geht es um die Herausforderungen für die Politische Bildung und um Modellprojekte, die gesellschaftliche Spannungen auf lokaler Ebene adressieren.