Details

At: 04/10/2024 3:30pm, in cooperation with:

Speakers:

Walderez Ramalho,
Eline Mestdagh,
Johana Wyss,
Pia Schramm

Claiming the People's Past: Populist Politics of History in the Twenty-First Century. Online Book Launch and Discussion, hosted by: Anthe Baele

From Thierry Baudet’s videos about Dutch history on YouTube to Jair Bolsonaro’s revisionist statements about the military dictatorship in Brazil: populists all over the world are using the past. The edited volume Claiming the People’s Past. Populist Politics of History in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2024) offers the first global and systematic overview of populist politics of history in the twenty-first century. This digital MSA session combines the launch of Claiming the People’s Past with a critical discussion by two experts on the volume’s contribution to the growing body of literature exploring the intrinsic relationship between memory and populism. How can we recognize populist engagements with the past? What challenges do populist engagements with the past bring for historians and memory scholars? Bringing insights from a variety of contexts together, the session discusses what the ‘populist moment’ means for new developments within the dynamic field of memory studies.

Speakers

Walderez Ramalho is professor of Theory of History at Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina (State University of Santa Catarina). His current research focuses on the politics of time and history, the contested nature of the temporal borders between the present and the past, and the varieties of historical times and their reverberations in contemporary public discourse. His recent publications include A experiência do momento histórico: Tempo-kairós, escrita de manifestos e estado de crise (The Experience of the Historic Moment: Kairos-Time, Manifestoes Writing, and State of Crisis, 2022), ‘Reinterpreting the “Times of Crisis” Based on the Asymmetry between Chronos and Kairos’ in História da Historiografia: International Journal of Theory and History of Historiography (2021), and ‘Historical Time between Chronos and Kairos: On the Historicity of the Kairos Document Manifesto, South Africa, 1985’ in Rethinking History (2020).

Eline Mestdagh is a historian and doctoral researcher at Ghent University, interested in the recent manifestations of memory activism related to the colonial pasts of the Netherlands and Belgium. In her PhD research, she investigates how activists in Brussels mobilize history in their struggle for social and racial justice. Adopting a methodology of ethnographic fieldwork and oral history, she investigates how ideas about the proper way to ‘deal with the past’ gain prominence in the interaction between memory activists and Belgian political and cultural institutions. She is one of the co-chairs of the Memory and Activism Working Group (MAWG) of the Memory Studies Association. She is also a board member of the Ghent-based interdisciplinary research forum TAPAS/Thinking About the PASt and the International Network for Theory of History (INTH).
Johana Wyss is a social anthropologist (DPhil, University of Oxford, 2018) and a tenured researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on the Silesian borderlands across the Czech Republic, Poland, and Germany. Her forthcoming book, Negotiating Collective Memory and Identity in Czech Silesia (CEU Press), examines the region’s historical legacies. She also explores mnemonic politics, identity negotiations, transnational borderlands, and the rise of polarizing politics in Central and Eastern Europe. She currently leads the ERC-funded project MEMPOP: Memory and Populism from Below: https://www.mempop.org.
Pia Schramm is a doctoral researcher, working in the Volkswagen-funded Project Challenging Populist Truth-Making in Europe: The Role of Museums in a Digital ‚Post-Truth‘ European Society, which is based at CARMAH at the Institute for European Ethnology of the Humboldt-University of Berlin. She studied Special Education and European Ethnology at the Humboldt-University in Berlin and at the Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and graduated in 2022 with a thesis concerning the challenges populism poses to museums in the digital sphere. She is currently also affiliated with the Institute of Cultural and Historical Anthropology at the University of Tübingen. She is interested in the intersections of political anthropology and digital anthropology, looking at the doings of ‘ordinary’ people in far-right and nationalist discourses.

Moderator

Anthe Baele is a historian and works as a FWO doctoral student at the Department of History at Ghent University. After obtaining a MA in History at Ghent University, she obtained an international Advanced MA in Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies at the KU Leuven. She works on the use of ‘history’ in interaction with the metaphorical ‘other’ and more specifically the reception of historical culture. Civic integration courses are her main area of research. Her current work makes a comparison between the role of history in civic integration courses in Flanders and The Netherlands.