28 Mar 2023 All day Room SG1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge

Description

Convenors

  • Ayala Panievsky (University of Cambridge)
  • Yong-June Park (University of Cambridge)

Speakers

  • Kathleen Blee (Collaboratory Against Hate Research & Action Center, University of Pittsburgh)
  • Nicole Curato (Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra)

Summary

Twenty-first-century global politics have seen the entrenchment of political movements inspired by populist right-wing values. The flourishing of populist politics worldwide has led to proliferating scholarship on the causes, characteristics and implications of right-wing populism for democratic societies. The burgeoning research on right-wing populism has given rise to new ethical dilemmas and emotional challenges for researchers, which – despite the increasing interest in populism studies – have been largely overlooked. We seek to address this timely blind spot by bringing together researchers of right-wing populism, and particularly those using qualitative and ethnographic methods, to share their experiences and explore the tensions in studying what Susan Harding has famously termed ‘repugnant others’.

This conference is aimed at advancing a more nuanced and sincere understanding of ethnographic methodologies when studying the populist right, by initiating an open conversation between academics and practitioners (i.e. journalists and documentarists) who are facing similar challenges. We believe that such a conversation, apart from creating a supportive emotional space, could inspire more innovative and creative methods and approaches to tackle right-wing populism. Importantly, this reflexive, global, and diverse CRASSH conference also highlights academic work that has been sidelined by the dominant Eurocentric scholarship on populism over the years.

The conference’s confirmed participants come from the Philippines, the Middle East, South Korea and beyond. We hope to inspire sociologists, anthropologists, digital ethnographers, journalists and culture producers from around the world to share their experiences from fieldwork in hostile environments, to reflect on them and on their meaning to knowledge production, and to learn from each other’s successes and failures.

For more information about this event, visit the conference website.

Supported by:

CRASSH grey logo

 

If you have specific accessibility needs for this event please get in touch. We will do our best to accommodate any requests.

Programme

10:30 - 11:00

Welcome and opening

11:00 - 12:00

Keynote:

Nicole Curato (University of Canberra)
‘Populism beyond technological determinism: a dispatch from the Philippines’

12:00 - 13:00

Who is ‘The Other’ here? Gender and right-wing populism

Tamta Gelashvili and Audrey Gagnon (Center for Research on Extremism, University of Oslo)
‘One of the boys: On researching the far-right as a woman’

Catherine Stinton (University of York)
‘True English Rose’: White women, ethnic nationalism, and the British far right’

Julia Leser (Humboldt University Berlin)
‘I don’t want you to be nice’: On emotional challenges, privilege and implicit complicity in white-on-white research on the far right’

13:00 - 14:00

Lunch

14:00 - 15:00

Keynote:

Kathleen M. Blee (University of Pittsburgh)
‘Challenging our own preconceptions when studying extremist White Supremacism’

15:00 - 16:30

Fieldwork or battlefield? The risks of studying the far-right

Maria Carmen Fernandez (University of Cambridge), Tanya Quijano and Abbey Pangilinan
‘Four challenges from the field amidst the Philippine Drug War’

Mohamed Salhi (Goethe Universität, Frankfurt)
‘Nationalist and populist sentiments in far-right discourses in Morocco’

Ryan Switzer (Stockholm University)
‘Violence and the far right: Our ethical duty to the othered’

Kumud Ranjan (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
‘Sociology of right-wing populism in India’

16:30 - 17:00

Break

17:00 - 18:30

Practitioners meet the populist challenge

Sian Norris, journalist and author of ‘Bodies Under Siege: How the far-right attack on reproductive rights

Callum Hood, Head of Research at the ‘Center for Countering Digital Hate’

Seyward Darby, author of ‘Sisters in Hate: American women on the front lines of white nationalism’

18:30 - 20:00

Screening of the acclaimed documentary ‘Unsettling’

Followed by Q&A with filmmaker Iris Zaki

For more information about this event, visit the conference website.

Call for papers

While the academic interest in right-wing populism worldwide has been booming in recent years, little attention has been given to the new ethical dilemmas, emotional challenges and concrete risks that ethnographic research of the populist right presents to scholars in the field.

This conference is aimed at advancing a more nuanced and sincere understanding of the use of ethnographic methods to study right-wing populist communities. We invite sociologists, anthropologists, digital ethnographers, journalists and other culture producers to an open conversation, where we can share our experiences from fieldwork in hostile environments, reflect on their meaning for knowledge production, and learn from each other’s successes and failures. Confirmed speakers will discuss their work in the Philippines, the Middle East and South Korea.

If this topic speaks to you and you have such reflections to share, please studyingrightwingpopulism@gmail.com, with the following:

  • Name and affiliation
  • An abstract of up to 200 words
  • A link to published work on right-wing populism

As we wish to advance work that has been sidelined by the dominant Eurocentric scholarship on populism,
priority will be given to researchers who work in under-studied contexts.

Deadline: 30 November 2022

 

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