Anne-Marlen Engler
Anne-Marlen Engler
Curriculum Vitae
Since 11/2016 PhD scholarship holder at the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung Germany
04/2016 - 08/2016 scholarship holder at the Law and Society Institute Berlin
05/2013 - 11/2014 student assistant at the Center for Interdisciplinary Women and Gender Studies
09/2012 - 10/2015 studies of law at the Humboldt-University Berlin and graduation in law; study focus: legal policy at the chair for Public Law and Gender Studies; final paper: "Von Gemeinnutz bis Zivilgesellschaft - Die Genealogie des Begriffes Gemeinwohl seit der Neuzeit" (the genealogy of the term Common Good)
10/2011 - 09/2012 student assistant at the Gender Studies Institute Marburg
02/2010 - 09/2012 studies of law at the Phillips-University Marburg
PhD-Thesis and Exposé
PhD-Thesis: "Refugee shelters as an exemplary case of the state of exception? A legal sociological analysis"
Carl Schmitt shaped the idea of a conjunction of sovereignty and the state of exception. Whereas Schmitt conceptualizes the state of exception as a state of exception, Giorgio Agamben broadens the concept and introduces a permanent state of exception as experienced in the camp - which he thinks of as the nomos of modernity. Within the camp, the sovereign rules over the inhabitants by way of reducing them to naked life. However, the state of exception is by no means a dictatorship; it is a lawless space (Agamben, Ausnahmezustand, 2004, 62)
My research project queries if German refugee shelters can be described as such lawless spaces in which the state of exception has become a quotidian reality. When arriving at the emergency shelters, the refugees have already undergone a first step of an integration by process (Luhmann, Legitmität durch Verfahren, 1993, 94f.): they have been registered by the German authorities. Furthermore, in theory, they have access to human rights as well as German law. However, reports about detentions in mass shelters which last for months or abuses by the security personnel seem to confirm a situation which the American academic Ayten Gündoğdu has called "Rightlesness in an Age of Rights". My research project wants to identify to what degree the refugees find themselves in "a bureaucratic situation similar to Kafkas castle" (Gündoğdu, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights, 2014, 203.) and whether their access to law is hindered by arbitrary actions of the private shelter companies. My research work is based on the idea that the concept of the state of exception cannot convincingly explain the situation in the camps since it does not consider the coexistence of a legal regulation and a de facto lawlessness.
Contact:
anne-marlen.engler@hu-berlin.de