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Paper short abstract

This paper shows how institutional ethics and dissemination practices manage affect and prioritise public perception. I argue that these technocratic commitments produce ethical voids that obstruct the development of a darker anthropology capable of meaningful epistemic confrontation.

Paper long abstract

The recent rise of far-right parties across Europe has generated a proliferation of projects and research initiatives that seek to explain this trend. A dominant narrative emerging from these studies locates neoliberalism as the causal node: contemporary far-right movements are seen to feed on the social and emotional consequences of four decades of privatisation, welfare retrenchment and economic precarity. My own ethnography among far-right actors in London supports this view. Interlocutors spoke less in the language of policy than of dignity, masculinity, pride and belonging, mobilising cultural identity at a moment when material solidarities have collapsed. Yet the epistemic infrastructure through which this data is interpreted and disseminated remains deeply neoliberal. Research practices, analytic frameworks and dissemination strategies tend to discipline an Other into categorical imperatives designed to manage affect and render it publicly manageable in the 'problem vs solution' binary. Anti-fascist anthropology carries complex ethical and epistemic commitments, but the institutions hosting such work often prioritise public perception over systemic critique, reproducing the very logics they seek to challenge. This tension extends well beyond the far right and is familiar to scholars of other 'difficult subjects.' The paper traces a genealogy of these commitments within the university, showing how technocratic ethics and risk-averse institutional cultures generate ethical voids that make research on contested populations increasingly fraught.