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Lab short abstract

Knowing fascism when it’s in your face: we invite you to a lab as a friends’ group chat in a collective doomscrolling sharing frenzy about the crises we are living in. With video reels, photos, memes, social media posts etc., friends present how they know what they know as autoethnography.

Lab long abstract

Knowing fascism, not as theory, but when it’s in your face: we invite you to a Lab as a friends’ group chat in a collective doomscrolling sharing frenzy about the crises we are living in. With video reels, photos, memes, social media posts etc., friends present how they know what they know as autoethnography. Suspending our usual theories, we ask participants to enact how “fascism” has mobilized activists confronting rightwing assaults today:

What are the signs of fascism, how does it proceed, and how do we know it is “here,” however defined? How do we counter the silences that its repression generates? How do people activate resistance? How are protest networks beginning to push back effectively? How do we maintain our own security? What tasks do we need to undertake, such as protecting the vulnerable, practicing solidarity with those attacked, dealing with our own traumas, and narrating our own visceral experiences of fascism? What roles do performance and graphics have in these accounts? How do we respond to fascist social media when it attacks us? How can these practices allow us to overcome polarization to convert antagonists into allies?

We ask participants to reflect on encountering polarizing authoritarianism and the affective dilemmas it poses. How is repression embodied, and what do you learn from it? How do you keep on going when the world is falling in on you? When can you convert (or not) antagonists into allies?