That Sinking Feeling: On the Emotional Experience of Inferiority in Germany's Neoliberal Education System

Emotions, especially those of impoverished migrant families, have long been underrepresented in German social and cultural studies. That Sinking Feeling raises the visibility of the emotional dimensions of exclusion processes and locates students in current social transformations. Drawing from a year of ethnographic fieldwork with grade ten students, Stefan Wellgraf’s study on an array of both classic emotions and affectively charged phenomena reveals a culture of devaluation and self-assertion of the youthful, post-migrant urban underclass in neoliberal times.

Stefan Wellgraf is a Heisenberg Fellow at the Institute of European Ethnology at Humboldt University in Berlin. His research focuses on ethnographic studies of schools in low-income neighborhoods in Berlin and right-wing subcultures in East Germany.