The seminar series CIP is organised in collaboration between three departments at the Faculty of Humanities: Department of Cultural Sciences (contact person Olga Sasunkevich), Department of Languages and Literatures (Andrea Castro) and Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion (Hjalmar Falk).
All seminars take place both at Humanisten (Renströmsgatan 6, Göteborg) and online. Pre-registration for online participation is required (see links below).
Schedule
September 2, 2025 at 15:15-17:00, Room C442
Link for registration: https://forms.office.com/e/cx7sJigfuR
Caroline Reinhammar, PhD student in Ethnology/FUDEM, University of Gothenburg
Unpacking “Common Sense”. A Critical Folkloristic Approach to Narratives of Climate Change Denial
This presentation will provide an example of how critical folklore studies can be conveyed when addressing contemporary social challenges, examining how the People as a political subject is constructed and utilized to challenge the acceptance of climate science in digital narratives. I do this through an analysis of social media content on a reoccurring trope where the relation between the people and those in power, in the material ascribed to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC, is likened to the Inquisition of Galileo Galilei by the Roman Catholic Church in the 17th century. Engaging with the scholarship surrounding critical folkloristics, I propose an allegorical analysis based on Fredric Jameson’s framework. I suggest that these narratives serve not just as tools of misinformation but disclose cultural, social, and political dimensions that reinforce existing hierarchies and resist climate action. The article aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of how common sense is constructed in climate obstructionist discourse, proposing the narratives form a climate lore of rejection. Ultimately, the ambition is to continue the discussion on the roles of digital folklore in understanding contemporary societal crises and the narratives that emerge within them.
October 9, 2025 at 15:15-17:00, Room C442
Link for registration: https://forms.office.com/e/9nafkWAsFe
Nicolai von Eggers, Aarhus University
Are we witnessing a new era of fascism?
In this talk, I discuss the uses and abuses of the concept of fascism when it comes to understanding the contemporary far right. Focusing particularly on Western Europe and the US, I discuss the ideological underpinnings of contemporary far right movements and the historical trajectories of these ideas. I argue that such an understanding is important for assessing our contemporary situation.
October 16, 2025 at 15:15–17:00, online via zoom
Link for registration: https://forms.office.com/e/aKnL919Xcs
Mark Devenney, Professor of Critical Theory, University of Brighton
Thinking Democracy and Populism after the ‘Anthropocene’
Democracy, we are constantly told, is in crisis both theoretical and political. Political scientists constantly try to resolve a range of supposedly fatal paradoxes. These include the so-called boundary problem; the chicken/egg problem of constitutional founding; the relation between formal and substantive freedom; whether representation constitutes a people or represents a pre-existing people. Politically, liberal democracies struggle with a range of internally generated crises: the inequalities that betray their own democratic promise; the disproportionate power exercised by financial elites and property owners; the undermining of sovereign powers and of borders by climate change, immigration, international crime and global markets; the election of neo fascist political parties that rely on the founding rules of democratic polities; as well as fundamental challenges to the dominant terms of gender, race and belonging. Most important is the climate crisis that threatens all life on earth, despite being generated by a smile minority of humanity.
In this lecture I argue that these are not crises of democracy. Rather, they compel us to rethink democratic politics anew. The first two decades of the 21st century place political philosophy in a position similar to Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions – the dying paradigm that structures our understanding of democracy is inadequate to the crises we face. Worse democratic politics is arguably complicit in those crises. The ‘morbid symptoms of this interregnum’ leave us with two options. We can refine our categories, patch up tears in the fabric of reality, and police the border posts that link democracy with popular sovereignty. Alternatively, we can engage in the labour of a theoretical revolution that recognises that these crises are generated by the dominant categories and dominant ways of being. This lecture makes four arguments for the radical rethinking of democracy in the 21st century allowing to us to forge a novel conception of demos adequate to the climate crisis.
December 2, 2025 at 15:15-17:00, Room C442
Link for registration: https://forms.office.com/e/e0R87akGCV
Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, Professor of Global Studies at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland
Discussant: Birke Friedlander, Lund University
Rage, Dreams and Insubordination: How the far right and social media mobilise the working class
In this talk, Rosana Pinheiro-Machado examines how the global far right mobilises the platform-based working class through digital media in the context of capitalism’s transformation. Drawing on 25 years of ethnographic research and various research projects on economic precarity in the global south, especially Brazil, she explores how rage, aspiration, and the search for recognition shape ambivalent political subjectivities. The talk explores the concepts of precarious entitlement and self-worth to explain why digital entrepreneurship can both empower and entrap workers, influencing their ideological alignments.
Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, an anthropologist, is a Professor of Global Studies at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland. She is the Director of the Digital Economy and Extreme Politics Lab (DeepLab) and the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded project "Flexible Work, Rigid Politics in Brazil, India, and the Philippines". Her ethnographic research explores the intersection of reactionary politics and precariousness in the emerging economies of the Global South.
