Historical and contemporary perspectives on culture wars, the arts, and the vulnerability and resilience of democratic institutions.
Organizer: “Words and Violence” research consortium, Nord university
Venue: Kjerringøy hotel, Bodø, Norway
Submission date (abstract): 20 February 2024
Conference dates: 4-6 June 2024
Pre-conference event: June 4 2024
Confirmed keynotes:
Anders Engberg-Pedersen – Director of Nordic Humanities Center University of Copenhagen and University of Southern Denmark. https://andersengbergpedersen.wordpress.com/
Gisèle Sapiro – Director of research, EHESS & CNRS, Paris. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gisele-Sapiro
Peter D. McDonald – Professor of literature. St Hughes, Oxford, England.
https://www.st-hughs.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-peter-mcdonald/
Alan Finlayson Professor of Political & Social Theory University of East Anglia. https://research-portal.uea.ac.uk/en/persons/alan-finlayson
Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen – Project lead “Words and Violence”, Nord university, Norway. https://www.nord.no/en/about/employees/kjetil-ansgar-jakobsen
Tore Rem – Director UiO Democracy. University of Oslo, Norway. https://www.hf.uio.no/english/people/aca/fac/uio-nordic/torere/index.html
Iryna Shuvalova. Ukrainian Poet. Postdoctoral researcher University of Oslo.
https://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/personer/vit/irynashu/index.html
Rachel Potter. Director of Research, professor of Modern Literature, University of East Anglia.
https://writersandfreeexpression
Dean Krouk – Professor of Nordic, University of Wisconsin. https://gns.wisc.edu/staff/krouk-dean/
Pre-conference event Tue June 4 at 18 h.: Screening of the film Weimar Express (Bulgaria 2023 1h 30min), in presence of the director Milena Fuchedjieva. – A documentary about Joseph Goebbels’ Europäische Schriftstellervereinigung (European Writer’s Union) and three writers who supported the new cultural order of Nazi-Germany, Fani Popova-Mutafova, Robert Brasillach and Knut Hamsun.
Theme
The interwar years offer an irresistible field of comparison for commentators reflecting on the challenges and dangers to democracy in the contemporary world. Indeed, in Scandinavian intellectual historiography, the 1930s have long been known as “the age of the culture wars”, when writers and intellectuals of the right and left fought it out in aggressive debates over gender, religion, race, sexuality and immigration. Major topics were censorship and the freedom of speech, with right-wing intellectuals routinely claiming that they were being denied a platform by mainstream liberal media. Meanwhile, democracy seemed to be on the defensive internationally, with authoritarianism and autocracy spreading and war looming.
Experiences from the recent surge of right-wing politics in the US, Europe and Russia, confirm a familiar pattern where right-wing intellectuals help authoritarian mobilization by the staging of “culture wars”. The renewed threat of authoritarianism makes it especially important to generate knowledge on how intellectual and civic freedoms were defended, lost, and regained in the 1930s and ‘40s, on along the way from culture wars, real wars and transitional justice.
We are interested in the way in which civil society continually invents and reinvents politics on its changing media platforms and the continued importance of people who know how to write and thus to renew the rhetoric of politics. Notably this transdisciplinary conference will examine the relation of writers and intellectuals to extreme politics, historically and today. It actually takes a certain type of intellectual firmness to bring democracy down, which is why “populism” finds its most dangerous forms when it is voiced by eloquent intellectuals.
We invite contributions dealing with censorship, freedom of speech and “cancel culture”, especially from a historical perspective.
The conference encourages cross-disciplinary collaboration between intellectual historians, scholars of literature, philosophers and social scientists concerning the dynamics of rhetoric and political thought in modern society. Bringing ideology back in means to study it in new ways, focusing not only on the lone professor or artist, but on the cognitive powers of tropes of speech and the spread of new rhetoric between various domains in society, the role of think tanks or various media platforms. Intellectuals exercise influence in specific technological and institutional contexts. We are interested in the way in which civil society continually invents and reinvents politics on its changing media platforms and the continued importance of people who know how to write and thus to renew the rhetoric of politics.
We invite contributions on conspiracy theory and media change. Today there is much research on the social media, the internet, and the conspiracy mindset. But the interwar years were also an age when conspiracy theories influenced politics, in a rapidly changing media environment. The antisemitic fantasies of Hitlerism and the paranoia of Stalinism were not more anchored in reality than the fantasies of QAnon, and they were in some cases spread by intellectuals. The controversies concerning the trustworthiness of professional journalism invites historical comparison. Thus, the contemporary concept of “fake news” is eerily similar to the way in which interwar right-wingers would deride journalism as “Lügenpresse”.
A final theme of the meeting is transitory justice in the cultural domain. Cultural autonomy is essential to liberal democracy; how did the transition from dictatorship and occupation to cultural autonomy and liberal democracy take place? What purges, trials, and tribunals among intellectuals occurred and did they help the transition from wartime occupation and dictatorship back to liberal democracy?
The conference is arranged by the Words and Violence research consortium, cofounded by Nord University, The Norwegian Research Council and partners.
Submission
Abstracts of 250 words should be submitted by email (see details below) along with a bio of no more than 150 words, with the subject heading “War, Literature and Ideology”.
Abstract should be sent to Ivar Bakke ivar.p.bakke@nord.no
no later than February 20th 2024.
Presenters selected for the conference will be invited to give a 25-minute presentation. Early career researchers who get their abstracts accepted will be provided with board and lodging.
For questions contact ivar.p.bakke@nord.no
Publication
Participants are encouraged to send their article manuscripts to a special issue of Acta Sociologica on Authoritarianism and Culture.
Program Committee
Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen kjetil.jakobsen@nord.no
Tanja Ellingsen tanja.ellingsen@nord.no
Pål Csasni Halvorsen pal.c.halvorsen@nord.no
Practical information
The conference is open and free of charge. Early career researchers who get their abstracts accepted will be provided with board and lodging, other interested are encouraged to get in touch and we can provide an offer for board and lodging at Kjerringøy.
The event will take place under the midnight sun at Kjerringøy hotel, in the beautiful old trading post of Kjerringøy, just north of Bodø. This historical site has a lot of commemorative culture linked to Knut Hamsun, the only Nobel Prize winning author to actively support Nazi-Germany during WW2. The great novelist grew up in the area, working as a salesclerk at the Kjerringøy trading post.
Bodø is accessible by train from Oslo, and there are frequent and inexpensive direct flights from Oslo (Norwegian Air or SAS). Participants are expected to organize their trip to Bodø on their own.
About “Words and Violence”
The Words and Violence project analyses the democratic resilience and vulnerability of cultural life in the 1930s and ’40s, using both statistical and qualitative approaches. The Norwegian experience is compared with that of other countries under fascist occupation during World War II, notably France. Focus is on the field of literature before, during and after the occupation. Researchers examine why writers, translators, and intellectuals made the choices they did, faced with censorship and terror, but will also explore a new kind of public investment in culture, orchestrated by the dictatorship. The aim is to produce solid knowledge about historical issues that are hotly debated and of obvious contemporary relevance, but that are rarely researched in a systematic way. Problems of memory politics and public history are emphasised.
Start and finish date: 01.06.2022 – 31.12.2027
Consortium: Nord University – Bodø, University of Oslo – Oslo, UiT The Arctic University of Norway – Tromsø, The Falstad Centre – Levanger, The Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies – Oslo and The National Library of Norway – Oslo and Mo i Rana.
