The event will take place on January 13, 2021, 6:00 - 7:45 pm (CET). To register, please send an email to anna.hasenauer@univie.ac.at.
From popular disobedience and civic rebellion against continuing quarantine measures to the ensuing proliferation of conspiracy myths and COVID denialism, the pandemic and its biopolitical management present us with explosive potential for authoritarian forms of politics and subjectivity.
Such authoritarianisms both thrive in and nurture “cultures of rejection”: everyday cultures structured by the rejection of political authority, immigration, elites, institutions of civil society, established media, shifting gender relations, or racialised/culturalised 'Others'.
Bringing together scholars from the transnational research project “Cultures of Rejection” (www.culturesofrejection.net) and distinguished guests, we discuss how the COVID-19 crisis affects this conjuncture. How does the pandemic and the states' pandemic management re-shape the socio-cultural terrain on which the far-right operates?
Stefan Jonsson and Birgit Sauer: Cultures of Rejection and the COVID-19 Crisis: An Introduction
Eva von Redecker: Covid-denial and the Recovery of Phantom-Possession
Richard Seymour: Particle Politics and Microfascisms
Manuela Bojadžijev: Comments
The discussion will be chaired by Benjamin Opratko
Eva von Redecker is a critical theorist and public philosopher. She holds a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie-fellowship at the University of Verona where she pursues a research project on authoritarianism (PhantomAiD). Her book Praxis und Revolution is forthcoming with Columbia University Press this summer.
Richard Seymour is a writer and author of The Twittering Machine (Indigo, 2019). He is also the founding editor of Salvage magazine.
Manuela Bojadžijev is Professor at the Institute for European Ethnology and Vice-Director of the Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research (BIM) at the Humboldt University Berlin. She is a member of the Cultures of Rejection Research Group.
Stefan Jonsson is Professor at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO) at Linköping University and has published widely on postcolonial theory, multiculturalism, diversity, racism, and racialization. He is a member of the Cultures of Rejection Research Group.
Birgit Sauer is Professor of Political Science at the University of Vienna. Her research fields include gender and politics, political representation, state and democracy, politics and affect, and right-wing populism. She is a member of the Cultures of Rejection Research Group.
Benjamin Opratko is Post-Doc Researcher at the University of Vienna (Department of Political Science) and a member of the Cultures of Rejection Research Group.
Further information
