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Techno and the GDR has been appropriated as right-wing heritage since the 1990s. I show how these claims to heritage have been constructed back then and today and ask role they play in a quest for cultural hegemony.

Paper long abstract

Techno and the GDR has been appropriated as right-wing heritage since the 1990s. I show how these claims to heritage have been constructed and contested.

Techno has been framed by the far right as a truly German culture, not polluted by American or Jewish influences, a vision that is both in opposition but also shows some resemblences to Techno being declared intangible cultural heritage of Berlin in 2024. Independently, there has been systematic attempts of right wing hooligans to take over the doors of Berlin techno clubs, thus practising another form of cultural appropriation.

In a similar way, the GDR has been imagined by fractions of the far right as the true German homeland, not polluted by foreigners and liberal elites. Some even imagine a combination of the GDR and Nazi Germany as an ideal state formation. At the same time votes for radical right parties have been particularly high in this region.

Both constructions have astonishing blind spots: Techno culture is historically usually associated with innovations of black musicians in Detroit and Chicago in the 1980s and the GDR was a socialist dictatorship which saw itself as a frontrunner in the fight against fascism. I show to what extent these claims to heritage work nervertheless and ask what role they play in quests for cultural hegemony.

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This paper examines the Estonian belief-system Maausk as a mediating framework through which heritage, land, and tradition are politicized today. Focusing on the far-right organisation Sinine Äratus, it shows how landscapes and ancestral memory are mobilized to naturalize ethnonational belonging.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the political life of heritage in Estonia by looking at the contemporary belief-system Maausk and its selective appropriation by the ethno-nationalist group Sinine Äratus. Maausk is often presented by its practitioners as an apolitical way of life, rooted in relationships with land, ancestors, and non-human beings. Yet its symbols and practices have become entangled with nationalist projects that stress territorial belonging, cultural continuity, and ethnic survival.

Drawing on ethnographic materials, the paper treats Maausk as a mediating assemblage through which symbolic relations to the land can be used for political ends. Sacred landscapes, folklore, and ancestral presence function as identity markers that make national belonging tangible and embodied. The analysis shows how Sinine Äratus mobilizes Maausk-inspired ecological and spiritual imaginaries to present environmental protection as an ethnic duty. At the same time, Maausk practitioners and activists promote alternative values that resist the reduction of sacred sites to nationalist exclusivity, while still engaging with wider ideas of Estonia as a “forest nation.”

By approaching heritage as a shared symbolic repertoire, the paper argues that the political power of Maausk does not come from explicit doctrinal alignment, but from its broad cultural legitimacy and its grounding in ecological and cosmological sensibilities. Maausk provides a common language through which care for land, non-human life, and ancestral continuity can be expressed across political divides. This allows far-right actors to embed exclusionary narratives within practices and values that are otherwise widely perceived as ethical, environmental, and culturally unifying.

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In this presentation, I examine how the emergence and promotion of prison museums across India are instrumentalised by contemporary political regimes, such that they align with and contribute towards the larger populist and nationalist discourses in their respective geographies.

Paper long abstract

Over the past two decades, India has witnessed a renewed engagement with multiple colonial-era prisons in various parts of the country, which, after being decommissioned, have been developed and/or renovated as public memorials to India’s freedom fighters and as heritage monuments of national significance. In this presentation, I examine how the emergence and promotion of these sites are instrumentalised by contemporary political regimes at the levels of the states and at the centre, such that they align with and contribute towards the larger populist and nationalist discourses in their respective geographies.

In the paper, I particularly pay close attention to the infrastructures of these former prisons and their restoration and renovation initiatives. I also equally attend to the objects set out on display at these prison museums, the iconography and the art that is installed, and the overall ambience that is created within these spaces, all of which are aimed towards (re)producing and amplifying powerful political messaging. And, I reflect on citizens' engagement with these sites, their artefacts, and the narratives they disseminate.

This presentation emerges from a work-in-progress project, and my findings are based on short-term preliminary fieldwork conducted at four former prison sites in the cities of Bengaluru, Ranchi, Port Blair, and Kolkata. For this presentation, I pair participant observation conducted at these sites with a close reading of prison memoirs, diaries, letters, auto/biographies, etc. of India’s freedom fighters who were once incarcerated in these prisons by the British Raj, and now have been iconified at these sites.

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This paper examines museums as sites of activism amid rising neo-nationalism, focusing on a co-curated exhibition in Lithuania that challenges homogenised ethnographic narratives. Through participatory practice, it explores how museums can counter polarisation and heritage appropriation.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary museums are increasingly framed not as neutral repositories of the past but as spaces of activism, where social inequalities, contested histories, and political tensions can be made visible and debated. Critical museology has shown that museum representations actively shape belonging and exclusion. This paper examines how museums can operate as sites of resistance to polarisation by reworking dominant heritage narratives through participatory practices.

Lithuanian ethnographic museums, historically modelled on nineteenth-century taxonomies and open-air folk traditions, also emerged from long colonial domination and forced Russification, when “Lithuanianess” and vernacular or “Indigenous” culture became central forms of resistance during the late Soviet period national revival movement. This produced a self-romanticising, homogenising heritage narrative that again exoticised rural life while positioning it as the core of national identity. This framework remains influential in cultural and academic discourse, however, excludes cultural minorities from national narrative.

In this context, the paper discusses a planning of co-curated exhibition at the Lithuanian National Museum that reimagines ethnographic heritage as a shared, living, and relational field. Through collaborative workshops with minorities and migrant communities, the exhibition sets the focus on co-existence rather than nostalgic imaginaries. Such museum activism, hopefully, counters polarisation by reducing heritage’s vulnerability to populist capture, fostering social resilience, and opening public space for difficult conversations on belonging and shared futures. The exhibition is urgent amid cultural struggles following the inclusion of a far-right nationalist party in government and its appropriation of ethnoculture for political ends.

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We examine how Hindu pilgrimage sites in Uttarakhand are mobilised as heritage within nationalist politics to construct exclusionary belonging, while infrastructure projects marginalise local communities and sacred relationships, revealing heritage as both a resource for exclusion and resistance.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Hindu pilgrimage sites associated with the Char Dham Yatra are mobilised as heritage resources within Hindu nationalist identity politics to construct exclusionary visions of national belonging in Uttarakhand, North India, while simultaneously serving as focal points for large-scale infrastructure projects that disregard local populations and ecological systems. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the research explores how heritage and infrastructure operate as entangled processes that materialize insider/outsider divisions—marginalising local communities, non-human actors, and divine beings, understood here not metaphorically but as locally acknowledged agents embedded in situated religious ontologies, in favour of tourist and pilgrim flows aligned with state and elite development agendas.

Our project conceptualises heritage as a resource complex embedded within power relations that shape both symbolic mobilisation and material transformation. It reveals how the Hindutva movement appropriates pilgrimage sites for exclusionary nationalist narratives, coinciding with infrastructure policies that local residents have come to describe as forms of profound disrespect toward local knowledge, spiritual relationships with the landscape, and the needs of mountain dwellers.

By examining the entanglement of heritage politics and infrastructural intervention, this research demonstrates how polarisation manifests not only in competing narratives but also in material transformations that generate experiences of marginalisation and loss. At the same time, it examines everyday practices of resistance—grounded in care for land, people, and sacred relationships—that contest these dual processes, revealing heritage as simultaneously a vehicle for exclusion and a resource for resilience.

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In this paper I juxtapose the recreation of socialist rituals in eastern Germany as critique and the failed attempt to tame ethnic tensions through a "traditional" dance house organised by a Catholic NGO in Hungary to explore the potential of critique and its cooptation.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I juxtapose two very different forms of heritage. First, I look at the recreation of old socialist rituals in eastern Germany as an expression of political critique staged amid a political climate of devaluation. As such the festivities produced membership in a collective of eastern Germans that could be read as a political critique, but as polysemic symbols also become adhesive for new forms of critique. In the second part of the paper; I turn to a táncház event organised in a school in Hungary amid of ethnic tensions. Despite its integrative intention, and efforts the atmosphere remained rather shallow and segregated. Originally táncház events were popularised in the 1970s and 80s as a tolerated alternative to – or even critique of – state socialist culture. Drawing mainly on Hungarian minority traditions in Romania, the events celebrated an imagined past of a happy peasantry. At first this movement’s political future remained open; however, by the 1980s the fusion of peasant ideology and irredentist nationalism became ever more obvious Despite this orientation the event was not enough to draw in the majority residents. This failing expressed the lingering of ethnic tension or even thickening atmosphere of segregation. In my talk I offer the notion of political atmospheres to understand these processes that do not not fit into a straightforward narrative or neat categories of democratic and authoritarian, liberal and conservative, or good and bad.

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At the Indo–Myanmar border in Mizoram, contested megaliths show heritage as affective and polarising. Through critical ethnography, I trace how Mizo claims to precolonial past, Hindutva narratives, and artistic interpretations intersect, revealing fractures and fragile possibilities of coexistence.

Paper long abstract

Located along the porous borders of India’s Northeast, Myanmar, and Bangladesh, Mizoram occupies both a geopolitical and cultural edge. This paper examines how heritage becomes a volatile site of belonging and polarisation through the contested interpretation of megalithic complexes in Champhai District (Mizoram) near the Indo–Myanmar border. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I analyse how these stones, marked by low-relief carvings of humans, animals, household items, and ceremonial figures, are mobilised within competing narratives of indigeneity and nationhood.

Approaching the megaliths as affective and material assemblages, the paper situates them within critical heritage studies. For Mizo people, they constitute rare material and visual evidence of precolonial presence, resonating with oral histories of 'Pasalṭha' (warriors) and the attainment of 'Thangchhuah' status, which promised entry into the afterlife ('Pialral'). In a context shaped by colonial misnaming and fragmented archives, these megaliths acquire heightened emotional and political force. Meanwhile, neo-nationalist actors seek to reframe them within broader Hindutva imaginaries of Indian antiquity, producing anxieties around cultural appropriation and epistemic erasure.

I situate this heritage struggle within wider processes of polarisation, including mistrust toward the Indian state, demographic pressures from displaced kindred communities, and internal tensions produced by claims to Mizo homogeneity. I further trace how artists and NGOs rework megalithic imagery into artworks and digital circulations, extending the site’s affective reach while complicating nationalist and indigenous claims. Read as heritage at the edge, these megaliths reveal how neo-nationalist nostalgia and indigenous resurgence intersect in heritage-making, foregrounding both fracture and fragile possibilities of coexistence.

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The paper delves into the November 2024 street violence in Amsterdam widely reported as a night of "pogrom" against Jews. In a landscape of polarization over Gaza, and right wing anti-antisemitism campaigns, it examines critical heritage as antidote to racial constructions of minorities.

Paper long abstract

The conflict between Jews and Muslims in Amsterdam—commonly revolving around solidarity with Palestine, and that solidarity in turn framed as a form of antisemitism—is widely understood within mainstream society as a foreign import from the Middle East. This paper is grounded in twenty years of living as a minority in the Netherlands, alongside long-term research into “the problem of minorities.” I argue that the tendency to externalize both social polarization and minorities themselves is rooted in a specifically Dutch culture of national remembrance and structured ignorance. Minorities, in turn, are locked into antagonisms in what Étienne Balibar describes as a dynamic of “sociological racisms.” Building on research into diasporic entanglements and a critique of antisemitism discourse, the paper proposes ways out of what Frantz Fanon famously described as a “vicious circle” of the objectification of “the other.”

As an antidote, I foreground non-hegemonic diasporic attachments, facets of Jewish Moroccan heritage, and counter-hegemonic historiography and heritage practices. The analysis advances through a close reading of a complex and overdetermined event: the “Maccabi riots” in Amsterdam in 2024, a moment of social unrest and breakdown of public order that coincided with Kristallnacht commemorations and a Holocaust remembrance ceremony.

The paper ultimately frames the politics of minorities in the Netherlands as part of a broader crisis of democracy. The central challenge, I argue, is not how to stifle, neutralize, or repress difference, but how to sustain a democratic multicultural society capable of holding difference together—maintaining what Ernesto Laclau terms a “chain of equivalences.”