LIAS Conference: Materialities of Populism
18. Feb - 20. Feb
Date: Tuesday, February 18th - Thursday, February 20th 2025, 10 am–3.40 pm
Location: Leuphana Central Building | C40.501
Language: English
Registration: lias.event@leuphana.de
In this three-day conference organised under the auspices of LIAS, we interrogate the materialities of populist politics. We look forward to bringing a diverse interdisciplinary cohort of international scholars to Leuphana to explore these lesser studied dimensions of contemporary populist political projects. While much of the critical literature has tended to focus on populist discourses traditionally understood, such as media discourse, political speeches, and popular political lexicons, by (re)forgrouding the materialities of populism we seek to render more intelligible the practices through which populist political projects reconfigure the spaces in which we live our lives - from the intimately local to planetary scale. In is a critical stance which grapples with the entanglements and distributions of violence and exclusion which constitute and saturate our present horizon. Some of the themes our invited speakers will explore include the following:
Ecologies of populism
(de)coloniality and populism
Infrastructures of populism
Temporalities and spatialities of populism
Violent entanglements and populism
The materialities of antagonism
Populism and contemporary apartheid(s)
The failures of liberalism and the conditions of populism
Spaces of resistance
Populism and cultural spaces
Authoritarian populism
Post-humanism and populism
Egalitarian populism
Material imaginaries of populism
Histories of populism
Speakers:
Gary Hussey, LIAS Fellow | Alex Demirović, LIAS Senior Fellow | Paula Bertuá, LIAS Fellow | Emmanuel Adeniyi, LIAS Fellow | Adrià Alcoverro, LIAS Alumnus | Mark Devenney, University of Brighton | Andy Knott, University of Brighton | Liam M. Farrell, Manchester Metropolitan University | Friederike Landau-Donnelly, TU Dortmund | Emília Barna, Budapest University of Technology and Economics | Ágnes Patakfalvi-Czirják, Budapest University of Technology and Economics | Salman Hussain, York University | Natalia Krzyzanowska, Örebro Universitet | Spyros Sofos Simon, Frazer University | Kamuran Akin, Humboldt-Universität Berlin | Noémi Farkas, University of Galway
Programme
Tuesday, 18 February
10:00–10:30 pm
Registration + Coffee
10:30–10:45 pm
Welcome address
10:45–12:35 pm
Alex Demirović
Adrià Alcoverro Pedrola: „The extreme right normalization and consumerism in a context of totalizing competition“
12.55–1.45 pm
Mark Devenney: „Beyond the Anthropocentric Politics of Populism“
3.15–4.55 pm
Friederike Landau-Donnelly: „Slipping whilst you dance at the abyss: A hydro- feminist materialist encounter with post- foundationalism“
Natalia Krzyzanowska
Wednesday, 19 February
10.00–11.40 am
Gary Hussey: „Untimely peoples, ‘dangerous memories’, and spaces of the apocalypse“
Liam M. Farrell: „A genealogy of plantationocene populism: reconstruction and repair in the wake of An Gorta Mór“
12.00–1.40 pm
Andy Knott: „Materiality, history, populism and non-populism“
Salman Hussain: „Body, Sexuality, and Nationalism: Rethinking the Materialities of Populism in Contemporary South Asia“
3.00–4.40 pm
Emília Barna: “Cultural labour and autonomy in the Hungarian music industries and the mainstreaming of populism”
Ágnes Patakfalvi-Czirják: “From Hungary with Love. The Infrastructure of Political Gratitude in the Orban Regime”
5.00–5.50 pm
Spyros Sofos: “Material Histories of Disenfranchisement: Political Economy, Ecology, and Racialization in TurkishPopulism”
Thursday, 20 February
10.00–11.40 am
Noémi Farkas: “’A Mirror for Ministers’: Material/discursive dis(con)figurations of history in contemporary Hungary”
Paula Bertúa: “Cosmo-Aesthetics: technical materialities and politics in contemporary Latin American Art”
12.00–12.50 pm
Kamuran Akin: “Colonial Nexus: Deforestation, securitization of dams, control and surveillance through the military infrastructural projects”
2.00–3.40 pm
Emmanuel Adeniyi: “The Weeping Earth: Entangled Humanism, Precarity, and Imaginaries in African Eco-Poetry”
