How does Berlin’s nightlife culture produce and sustain an affective image of permissiveness in which recreational drug use becomes culturally intelligible and socially legitimate?

This doctoral project developed from my M.A. research on Berlin’s party-drug scene.

The earlier study focused primarily on drug normalisation, accessibility, subculture and social pressure within Berlin nightlife. The doctoral project shifts the analytical focus toward the broader cultural conditions through which permissiveness itself becomes meaningful, socially legitimate and embedded within the city’s identity.

The project therefore moves from asking why certain practices become normalised to examining how nightlife may produce the cultural meanings, affective experiences and informal forms of regulation through which those practices become intelligible and socially legitimate.

Research on recreational drug use, subculture and urban transformation has often developed across separate fields.

Drug normalisation is frequently studied as social behaviour. Subculture is often approached through identity and symbolic resistance. Urban research, meanwhile, has examined Berlin’s transformation into a global creative and nightlife destination.

This project brings these conversations together.

It examines how practices once understood as transgressive can become culturally aestheticised, socially accommodated and incorporated into a city’s wider identity, raising broader questions about freedom, regulation, belonging and the commodification of resistance.

Affective Governance
How emotions, atmosphere, belonging and shared expectations may participate in regulating social life alongside formal rules.

Aestheticised Permissiveness
A concept developed within the project to examine how practices historically regarded as transgressive can become stylised, culturally meaningful and incorporated into wider urban imaginaries.

Subcultural Capital
The forms of knowledge, taste, competence and participation through which authenticity and distinction are negotiated within cultural scenes.

Urban Imaginaries
The stories, images and meanings through which cities are understood, represented and experienced.

Liminality
Social spaces or moments in which ordinary structures and expectations are temporarily suspended or transformed.

Commodified Resistance
The process through which practices associated with opposition or nonconformity can become incorporated into cultural and economic value.

Belonging
How people experience recognition, attachment and legitimacy within social and cultural worlds.

Moral Economy
The informal values and judgments through which people negotiate what is acceptable, legitimate or excessive.

The project is designed around a qualitative ethnographic approach to examine the lived, cultural and regulatory dimensions of Berlin nightlife.

The planned research combines:

• semi-structured interviews;

• participant observation;

• discourse analysis;

• phased qualitative fieldwork in Berlin.

The core design centres on people embedded within Berlin’s nightlife and techno scenes, with the possibility of incorporating additional actors such as harm-reduction workers, club operators and policy stakeholders as the project develops.

The research prioritises depth of narrative and contextual understanding over quantitative scale.

The project aims to:

• examine how Berlin nightlife may produce and sustain cultural ideas of permissiveness;

• explore how belonging, freedom and moral boundaries are negotiated within nightlife environments;

• analyse nightlife as a space of informal regulation and affective governance;

• investigate how transgressive practices can become forms of symbolic and economic capital;

• contribute to Cultural Studies debates on subculture, urban identity, commodified resistance and the governance of transgression.

Status: Ongoing Doctoral Research
Institution: Leiden University
Affiliation: Graduate School of Humanities · Leiden University Centre for Arts in Society (LUCAS)

The project is currently in its initial doctoral phase, with work focused on literature consolidation, theoretical refinement, research design, ethics preparation and doctoral training.

Primary doctoral fieldwork has not yet been completed.

Ethical approval will be secured before doctoral data collection begins. Given the sensitivity of research involving recreational drug use and nightlife communities, particular attention will be given to informed consent, confidentiality, data protection and the minimisation of re-identification risks.

• Dick Hebdige & Sarah Thornton
  Subculture, symbolic resistance and subcultural capital.

• Victor Turner & Mikhail Bakhtin
  Liminality, ritual inversion and the temporary suspension of ordinary social norms.

• Sara Ahmed
  Affective economies and the circulation of emotion through social worlds.

• Michel Foucault & Mariana Valverde
  Governmentality, regulation and everyday forms of urban governance.

• Mike Featherstone & Chris Rojek
  Leisure, consumption and the commodification of cultural experience.

• E.P. Thompson & Didier Fassin
  Moral economy and the negotiation of legitimacy, judgment and excess.

• Luis-Manuel Garcia
  Berlin techno culture, techno-tourism and the relationship between nightlife and urban transformation.

The first phase of the doctorate focuses on consolidating the literature, refining the theoretical framework, preparing ethics and data-management processes, preparing pilot work and undertaking doctoral training through LUCAS.

Later phases are planned to move into qualitative fieldwork, including interviews and participant observation, followed by analysis and theoretical integration.