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Visualising populist identities: populist performances on screen(s)
On Dec 2-3 an online symposium organised by Dr Jessica Wax Edwards, the Centre for Mexican Studies, University College Cork (Ireland) and the Centre Interlangues Texte, Image, Langage, Université Bourgogne Europe (France) in collaboration with The Populism Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association too place. Featuring keynote speakers: Benjamin Moffitt (Monash University, Australia) The Visual Politics of Populism: Reflections on the (Accidental) Creation of a Subfield María Esperanza Casullo (Universidad Nacional de Río Negro, Argentina) Baroque Bodies: Appearance and Performance in Latin American Populism.
Instances of populist performance continue to proliferate around the world, a phenomenon witnessed in tandem with the increasing mediatisation of politics. Public figures are now subject to 24-hour multimedia news cycles, they voluntarily show their private lives on social media, share constant photo and video updates on their feeds and might at any moment be the subject of mass popular memeification. Indeed, populist actors are noted for their pioneering use of digital media to bypass traditional channels and connect with audiences (Albertazzi & Bonansinga, 2023; Villaplana & Fitzpatrick, 2024). Despite this obvious connection, there remains a lack of significant and wide-ranging studies into the relationship between populist performance and its visual representation. Recent work attempts to address this dearth in areas such as fiction television and film (Coladonato, Holdaway, Pilipets and Valera-Ordaz, 2024), social media communication (Mendonça & Duarte Caetano, 2020; Mazzoni & Mincigrucci, 2022), analogue and digital campaign strategies (Baldwin-Philippi, 2019; Dessewffy, 2023), alongside thematic focuses around bodily representation (Casullo, 2020), embodiment (Diehl, 2017) and identification (Ostiguy & Moffitt, 2021). Nonetheless, there is still a need for more scholarship devoted to the aesthetic, theatrical and visual elements of this performance. This event brings together scholars working on populist actors and audiences throughout history and around the world to examine how visual representations contribute to the construction and perpetuation of populist identities. This includes but is not limited to documentaries, television shows, televised political appearances, visual social media platforms (such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram), news imagery, memes, posters etc. The event was organised as part of Dr Wax-Edwards Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship (2024-2026), funded by the European Union.
For more on the conference please see here https://sites.google.com/view/populismspecialistgroup/events/visualising-populist-identities
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For more on this story please contact jwax-edwards@ucc.ie