Naples NA
Italia
Over the past decades, populism has increasingly gained ground both on a national and global scale,
turning from an epiphenomenon into a structural aspect of contemporary world politics. Despite its
idiosyncratic features within the manifold socio-historical contexts worldwide, at the core of
populism lies the constitution of an anti-establishment and anti-intellectual group claiming
sovereign powers for a putative homogeneous collectivity, “the people” (Laclau 2005).
The nationalist drives articulated by populist leaders are propagated within offline as much as online settings,
fostering in the latter case the diffusion and intensification of “webpopulism” (Mojca and Birgit 2018). These rhetorical
strategies nevertheless risk disseminating manipulative propaganda and alarmist discourses of fear
and hatred among citizens, with the effect of exacerbating stereotypical representations and
hostility towards an imagined Other. Amidst this scenario of uncertainty, Australia and New Zealand,
among other Antipodean countries, have not been spared from the populist surge. However, while
forms of traditional and digital populism have been comprehensively explored in the European and
American continent, other sub-regional forms have been excluded from scholarly attention,
substantiating the so-called “Atlantic-bias” (Moffitt 2017).
The panel aims to offer a space of critical discussion on these still-to-be thoroughly investigated aspects of Antipodean populism and invites contributions on the following subjects:
• Ideologies and Populist Propaganda
• Populism and its Meanings
• Persuasion and Manipulation in the Cyberspace
• Hate Speech in Populist Discourses
• Refugee Crisis and Migration
• Hansonism
• Imagined Others
• Islamophobia and White Fundamentalism
• Neo- and Techno- Colonialism
• Telepopulism and Webpopulism
• Emotionality, Attitudes and Populism
• Post-Truth and Digital Era
• Indigenous Politics and Antipodean Populism
• Populist Narratives and Counter-Narratives
• Cross-National and Trans-National Populisms
• Multimodality of Populism
• Left versus Right Populisms
• Populism and Gender
• Populism and Identity Politics
Please send a 250-words abstract and a 100-words bio-note clearly identifying the title of the panel
in the object of your email to the email address easanaples2020@gmail.com and
ariannagrasso@unior.it by November 15, 2020.
All accepted participants will be expected to become members of EASA as a precondition to
presenting their papers. Details of EASA membership are available on the association’s website at
this address: http://www.easaaustralianstudies.net/easa/office. A call for full-academic length
papers derived from conference presentations will be issued after the conference for publication in
the Association’s online journal JEASA (http://www.easaaustralianstudies.net/ejournal/call)