Workshop
Far-right Memory in Digital Age
The workshop aims to explore the far-right digital memory activism as well as its actors, cultural forms, and digital platforms and to open the space for new theoretical and methodological conceptualizations. The workshop is funded by the Collaborative Research Centre 1199 "Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition" and the InRa study "Institutions & Racism" (funded by the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Home Affairs).
The workshop “Far-right Memory in Digital Age” addresses the conjunction of far-right and digital media in memory production. For a long time, various disciplines have focused on far-right groups due to their radical ideology, racism, violence, and threat to democracy. Their memory practices, on the other hand, have been largely ignored. This workshop attempts to shed more light on far-right digital memory activism.
For decades, research on collective memory has focused on the tensions between liberal, human-rights memory, and illiberal memory projects, contrasting national amnesia regarding the criminal past with requests to foster a self-critical human-rights memory. The role of far-right actors has remained underresearched. At the same time, there is increasing evidence that the state actors fostering illiberal memory often operate together with far-right communities. The far right promotes violence by celebrating genocide and ethnic cleansing campaigns from the past while turning fascists, war criminals, and terrorists into its heroes. The ideology of the far right, based on radical ethnonationalism, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia, is perpetuated and justified through the creation of new memory.
Contrary to disciplines like history, sociology, and political sciences—which have closely focused on the far-right, its history, organization, and ideology—memory studies have long ignored the far right and its memory practices. Far-right memory activism has become even more pertinent with the rise of digital media, which has provided additional opportunities for far-right mobilization and activism. The conjunction of far-right and digital media in memory production poses a whole set of questions about this new kind of memory as well as its characteristics, operation, and effects.
Please contact Dr. Katarina Ristic for further details and questions regarding the workshop.
Programme of the workshop
Thursday, 8 June 2023
| 17:00 | Arrival of Participants and registration 17:30 | Oliver Decker (Leipzig University): Opening 17:45 | Katarina Ristić (Leipzig University): Welcome 18:00 | Anna Wagner (Bielefeld University) and Christian Schwarzenegger (University of Bremen) 20:00 | Dinner ____________________________________________________________________________________ |
| Friday, 9 June 2023 | 8:30 - 9:00 | Morning Coffee 9:00 | Katarina Ristić, (Leipzig University)
Panel I 10:00–12:00 Far-right Memory Politics
12:00–13:30 | Lunch
Panel II 13:30–15:30 Far-right Memory of WWII
15:30–16:00 | Coffee break
Panel III 16:00–18:00 Far-right Violence, Perpetrators and Memory
20:00 | Dinner ____________________________________________________________________________________ |
| Saturday, 10 June 2023 | 8:30–9:00 | Morning Coffee Panel IV 9:00–12:00 Memory wars in digital age
12:00–13:00 | Lunch Panel V 13:00–14:00 Round table discussion Methodological and Theoretical Considerations for research on far-right memory in digital age 14:00–15:00 | Coffee Farwell |