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TEAM Dimitris Soudias

Soudias_Copyright_Vangelis Patsialos

Dr. Dimitris Soudias

Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter
Nora-Platiel-Straße 1 · ­34127 Kassel · ­Raum 2208

Tel.: +49 561 804-3253 · Fax: +49 561 804-3464

Mail:  

Sprechstunde: nach Vereinbarung per E-Mail

Kurzbiografie

Dr. Dimitris Soudias is a Walter Benjamin Fellow in the Globalization and Politics Division at the University of Kassel, and an affiliated researcher in the Chair Group European Culture and Literature at the University of Groningen. His research builds on political sociology and cultural economy approaches to study such issues as solidarity, creativity, happiness, social innovation and entrepreneurship in neoliberalism. Dimitris is the principal investigator of the DFG-funded research project Welfare Visions 2.0: Future-Making Practices in the Social Economies of Athens and Berlin (WELFAIR). Prior to joining the University of Kassel, Dimitris held research positions and fellowships at the University of Groningen, the University of Amsterdam, the London School of Economics, Philipps-Universität Marburg, and Freie Universität Berlin. He was also a member in the theme group 'The Politics of (De)familiarization' at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (Spring 2022), and the Head of Library and Information at the Goethe-Institut Athens (2018-2020). Dimitris received his doctorate in political science from Philipps-Universität Marburg (2019). He holds a University Teaching Qualification (BKO) from the University of Groningen, a Graduate Diploma in Middle East Studies from the American University in Cairo, and a Dipl. Pol. in political science from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Dimitris' most recent book, Paradoxes of Emancipation: Radical Imagination and Space in Neoliberal Greece , has been published with Syracuse University Press.

Forschungsschwerpunkte

• Cultural Economy (Economy as Culture), Neoliberalism
• Social Welfare, Social Entrepreneurship, Solidarity Economies
• Radical Political Theory, Protest, Radical Imagination
• Orientalism, Cultural Essentialism
• Pragmatism, Abductive Research Strategies, Ethnography
• Sociology of Space, Practice Theory, Governmentality and Subjectivity

Regionaler Schwerpunkt: Europe (esp. Germany, Greece), West Asia and North Africa (esp. Egypt)

Aktuelle Publikationen

  • Soudias, D. (2023). Paradoxes of Emancipation: Radical Imagination and Space in Neoliberal Greece. Syracuse University Press.
  • Soudias, D. (2014). Negotiating Space. The Evolution of the Egyptian Streets, 2000-2011. The American University in Cairo Press.
              • Boletsi, M., Lippert, F., & Soudias, D. (in Preparation). New Normals, New Weirds. Contemporary Cultures and Politics of (Ab)Normality. Cultural Studies.

              • Soudias, D., & Sydiq, T. (2020). Theorizing the Spatiality of Protest. Contention, 8(1). doi.org/10.3167/cont.2020.080102

              • Fischer-Tahir, A., & Soudias, D. (2015). Reconfiguring Periphery: Localizing Spatial Dependencies of Capitalism in West Asia and North Africa. Middle East – Topics and Arguments, 5. doi.org/10.17192/meta.2015.5.3800

                          • Soudias, D. (2018). On the Spatiality of Square Occupations. Lessons from Syntagma and Tahrir. In A. Starodub & A. Robinson (Eds.), Riots and Militant Occupations. Smashing a System, Building a World – A Critical Introduction (pp. 75-95). Roman & Littlefield.

                          • Schumann, C., & Soudias, D. (2013). Präsenz und Raum in der Arabischen Revolte. Ägypten im Jahr 2011. In C. Ernst & H. Paul (Eds.), Präsenz und implizites Wissen. Zur Interdependenz zweier Schlüsselbegriffe der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften (pp. 297-315). Transcript.

                                      • Soudias, D., & Transfeld, M. (2014). Mapping Popular Perceptions: Local Security, Insecurity, and Police Work in Yemen. Yemen Polling Center, Report (4). ssoar.info/ssoar/handle/document/77108
                                      • Soudias, D. (2023). Transmuting solidarity: hybrid-economic practices in the social economy in Greece. Journal of Cultural Economy. doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2023.2264292

                                      • Soudias, D. (2021). Subjects in crisis: Paradoxes of emancipation and alter-neoliberal critique. The Sociological Review, 69(5), 885-902. doi.org/10.1177/00380261211019270

                                      • Soudias, D. (2021). Imagining the Commoning Library: Alter-Neoliberal Pedagogy in Informational Capitalism. Journal of Digital Social Research, 3(1), 39-59. doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v3i1.58

                                      • Soudias, D. (2020). Griechenlands COVID-19-Krise und die Ökonomisierung von Sicherheit. Soziopolis: Gesellschaft Beobachten. ssoar.info/ssoar/handle/document/77033

                                      • Soudias, D. (2020). Spatializing Radical Political Imaginaries. Neoliberalism, Crisis, and Transformative Experience in the Syntagma Square Occupation in Greece. Contention, 8(1), 4-27. doi.org/10.3167/cont.2020.080103

                                      • Soudias, D. (2015). Policing January 25: Protest, Tactics, and Territorial Control in Egypt’s 2011 Uprising. Middle East – Topics and Arguments, 4, 170-182. doi.org/10.17192/meta.2015.4.2669

                                      Forschungsprojekte

                                      Welfare Visions 2.0: Future-Making Practices in the Social Economies of Athens and Berlin (WELFAIR)

                                      Faced with COVID-19, the European Commission re-discovered the social economy (SE) sector as a central answer to the social, economic, and ecological consequences of the pandemic. The Commission adopted the Social Economy Action Plan in December 2021, following the launch of a High-Level Expert Group on the Future of Social Protection and the Welfare State in the EU in November 2021. Policy-makers assume the SE can do both: alleviate the precarizing impacts of crises by delivering social needs provision, thereby generating jobs and growth; and transform current models of the economy and social needs provision, for an inclusive and sustainable future. Here, social entrepreneurs are attributed a “visionary” role by both policy-makers and scholars, because they are assumed to innovate solutions that put social and environmental concerns at the heart of their business model: prioritizing social impact over profit. How social entrepreneurs themselves imagine and enact the future of society, however, remains understudied.The project WELFAIR addresses this gap, through a comparative study of social entrepreneurs’ future-making practices in Athens and Berlin. Situated between economic sociology and cultural political economy, this project asks: How do social entrepreneurs imagine the future of the economy and social needs provision, and what role do they attribute to themselves and the social economy to this regard? How to they enact this future?Answering these questions will contribute to advancing our knowledge about expectations in the market and the state for social needs provision, if and how expectations are changing in (post-) pandemic times, and what consequences these changes may have for how social needs are understood, and provided for. A central claim is that social entrepreneurs’ experiences with economic uncertainty put them in a position where they reproduce some of the forms of inequality they intend to alleviate and overcome in the first place. Data collection is based mainly on interviews with social entrepreneurs, and analysis is based on grounded-theory coding. The cases of Athens and Berlin promise analytically insightful variation because of their contrastive configuration regarding welfare systems and social economy funding. This variation arguably influences the ways in which social entrepreneurs envision and enact the future of the economy and social needs provision.

                                      Advisory board members:
                                      Maria Boletsi (University of Amsterdam / Leiden University, The Netherlands)
                                      Kevin Featherstone (London School of Economics, UK)
                                      Dieter Plehwe (WZB – Berlin Social Science Center / University of Kassel, Germany)
                                      Nicos Souliotis (EKKE – National Centre for Social Research, Greece)