The “Just City” and the Violence of Ethics in (Anti-Trump) Protests (New York City)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Moritz Ege
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2015 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 240207984

Based on the research project “Moscow: Urban Ethics of Protest and the Violence of Ethics”, this new project takes current protests in New York City against the government of President Trump as its point of departure. These protests will be researched ethnographically in order to better understand the dynamics that develop between, on the one hand, protesters and groups who aim to fight specific political representatives and figures, and, on the other hand, those whose demands primarily concern their own interests. Following a terminology that is widespread in Moscow, we provisionally term the former “political” and the latter “social protests”. These protests take place within a context of increasing critiques (and self-critique) of ‘voluntarist’ urban ethical actors and their projects that are connected to authoritarian populisms, which coincide with stark social inequalities and also with neoliberal forms of governance. In order to approach these matters, we chose arenas of contact and conflict in which the contradictions of such protests can be observed in a condensed form. These are:(a) protest alliances against the Trump presidency. Here, models of political representation that are characteristic of the liberal left and more radical, empowerment-oriented approaches come together performatively, especially in reference to a “good”, inclusive city;(b) a Community Center which tries to balance fighting for the rights of marginalized groups – in the name of a “just city” – and administering social welfare policies. Here, the “common interest” of urban groups who are marginalized and precarious in different ways, and alliances between them are constantly being negotiated and contested;(c) labor struggles that partly make common cause with anti-Trump protests but also at times stand in a conflictual relationship with them. Analytically, the project is interested in: (1) strategies for achieving and maintaining the common interests and consensus in protests and between protests; (2) concomitant contradictions, dissent and tensions; (3) connections between these matters and ideals of a good and just city; (4) the ways in which people in protest movements approach and contest public “figurations” that circulate in media discourses on protests, i.e. privileged, “ethical” urban liberals, minorities oriented to identity-politics and a resentful, white working class.The project’s goal is to better understand the forms, functions and effects of current urban protest practices and to situate them in urban research and also in relationship to a specific historical conjuncture. In order to further develop the concepts of urban and protest research, the case study will highlight the connections between urban-ethical protests, technologies of governance, imaginations of justice and of the city, constructions of ethical urban subjects and the forms of power and violence in which they are embedded.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2101: Urban Ethics: Conflicts about the good and proper conduct of life in 20th and 21st century cities
• International Connection: Switzerland