Short Abstract

This panel looks at discrimination and violence in German institutions through the lens of affect and embodiment. How do intersectionally disadvantaged people navigate racialized affective hierarchies, epistemic injustice, and bureaucratic obstacles in hospitals, migration offices, and courts?

Long Abstract

This workshop examines affective and embodied experiences surrounding intersectional forms of exclusion, discrimination, and violence in German institutions. Whether in hospitals, migration offices, schools, or courts, intersectionally disadvantaged individuals often report negative experiences. Yet when they react or complain, they are often dismissed, or even viewed as the problem themselves. Beyond formal policies of non-discrimination, invisible barriers emerge within the very laws, cultures, and everyday practices of institutions. Such structural discrimination is associated with affectively charged experiences. Blickstein (2019) and Lorde (1981) expose a hierarchy in which “white affect“ is structurally privileged over the physical well-being of racialized people. This shapes everyday practices in hospital care, threatening the safety of marginalized patients. Affective hierarchy is entangled with epistemic injustice in gender-based asylum-seeking cases (Settler 2018) as well as bureaucratic obstacles when applying for welfare assistance (Ratzmann 2021). Thus, the state can inflict wounds (Parson 2013). Yet this affect-state-discrimination nexus remains understudied in Germany. We are ethnographically and analytically examining how "emotions do things" (Ahmed 2004) by asking:

- How can the construction and enactment of categories (e.g. race, gender, age) be traced in affectively charged interactions with institutions?

- As categories of discrimination are often invisible in German government data, how can emotional responses, including anger and mutual care, make intersectional institutional discrimination and violence visible?

- What political significance and transformative potential does affect have vis-à-vis institutional epistemic injustice?

This workshop aims to advance debates surrounding the intersections of power, affect, and embodiment within German state and social institutions.