Cathrine Bublatzky awarded grant from the Thyssen Foundation

The
Fritz Thyssen Foundation has extended its support for the organisation of the workshop Populist Aesthetics in Cultural Perspectives: Truthmaking, Faking, and the Politics of Affect in (Digital) Media at the Heidelberg Centre for Asian and Transcultural Studies (CATS) on March 10–11, 2022. The event is organised by the assistant professor of
Visual and Media Anthropology at the HCTS,
Dr. Cathrine Bublatzky, together with
Dr. Simone Pfeifer (Mainz/Cologne). The collaboration for this conference has been supplemented by a seminar and joined student workshop on “media affects” organised by Cathrine Bublatzky at the HCTS in 2021.

The workshop will bring together scholars from anthropology, media studies, and regional studies to reflect on aesthetic dynamics in populist movements and address the following question: how do sensory perception and affective media practices shape understandings of the world and political subjectivities in peculiar ways? To this scope, researchers from different regional contexts will discuss commonalities and differences in their fields of research beyond charismatic leaders in order to gain theoretical and empirical insights into aesthetic dynamics of populist movements. The different case studies will point beyond the Euro-American focus, thus offering a cultural comparative perspective.

The four panels 1. Populist Aesthetics, Affect, and Emotions; 2. Populist Activism & Spectacle; 3. Image Politics, Fake News, and Trust; and 4. Populist Digital Encounters & Media promise to illuminate the complex digital, audio-visual, and textual mediations of populist movements. The event aims to connect scholars from different career stages and different disciplines while paving the way to a long-term international collaboration, ideally culminating with the publication of the conference contributions.

The conference is co-financed by the
Baden Württemberg Foundation and the projects "
Contemporary photography as a cultural practice by diasporic Iranians in Europe" (HCTS, project leader Dr. Cathrine Bublatzky) and "
Jihadism on the Internet: Images and Videos, their Appropriation and Dissemination" (
Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz).

The current call for papers is available on the
workshop website.

The full conference programme with information on presentations and participants will soon be published too.