Frank Gadinger

In addition to my current position as a guest professor, I have been a Senior Researcher at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen since 2012. I lead an interdisciplinary research group concentrating the topics of “Polycentric Governance” and “Legitimation and Delegitimation in Global Cooperation”. Together with international scholars, our research aims to understand under which conditions global cooperation succeeds and oftentimes fails (e.g. climate change). I completed my Diplom in Political Science at the Goethe University Frankfurt in 2002. Furthermore, I wrote my doctoral dissertation (Dr. phil., 2012) at the same university on the justification of the US “war on terror”. During this time, I worked as a research associate at the University of Mainz and the University of Duisburg-Essen and held a fellowship at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS) at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington D.C. I founded the research group “Political Narratives” at the NRW School of Governance in Duisburg in 2012 in which I still collaborate with fellow colleagues. In my recent research, I focus on practice theory and narrative analysis in the field of International Relations. My major aim is to develop new research methodologies (e.g. visual narrative analysis) to study practices and narratives in world politics. In empirical terms, most of my recent works deal with the puzzling rise of global populism and the question how right-wing populists develop appealing narratives around emotions and images and mobilize their target audience. Furthermore, I am interested in the causes and dynamics of urban riots in Western cities, new forms of protest and resistance (e.g. whistleblower Edward Snowden), and the role of conceptual artists and their visual strategies of critique in public discourse. The monography “International Practice Theory” (with Christian Bueger), published by Palgrave MacMillan (2nd edition 2018) offers an initial overview of my scientific work. My recent article, “Populist Stories of Honest Men and Proud Mothers: A Visual Narrative Analyis” (with Katja Freistein) in “Review of International Studies” (2020), is likewise instructive.

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