Event | ‘Conspiratorial Memory’ – Workshop

Cover image: a still from Vesti Nedeli (Russia 1), broadcasted on March 20^th, 2022 [02:30:30]. https://smotrim.ru/video/2393639

Event | ‘Conspiratorial Memory’ – Workshop
Date: June 9-10, 2022
Location: Tolhuistuin (June 9); University of Amsterdam, P.C. Hoofthuis (June 10)
Organizers: Boris Noordenbos, Anna Greszta, Maria Plichta, Ilya Malafei
Contact: conspiratorialmemory@gmail.com
Credit: 1 or 2 ECTS
Registration: here
Registration Deadline: May 29th, 2022
Read more about the workshop’s program here 

Over the past months the Russian leadership has legitimized its unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine with a mixture of ludicrous historical parallels and far-fetched conspiracy theories. These propaganda narratives – which state-backed Russian culture and media have fomented for years – routinely recycle myths about the hot and cold wars of the twentieth century, harnessing them to fuel suspicious and self-righteous readings of current affairs. The situation prompts a series of more general questions: to what extent do conspiracy theories derive their rhetorical and affective persuasiveness from stories about the past? What is the role of culture (online and offline, fiction and nonfiction) in the imagination of hidden plots allegedly hatched by past and present enemies, and directed against “our” community? And, conversely, to what extent is a sense of “community” – and its “malevolent others” – shaped through what we call “conspiratorial memory,” its political exploitation, its cultural mediations, and its digital circulation? These and related questions will be addressed in a two-day workshop organized by the team of the ERC-funded research project Conspiratorial Memory: Cultures of Suspicion in Post-Socialist Europe (2021-2026).

The Russian war against Ukraine spotlights the most aggressive purposes served by conspiratorial memory. Yet in other Eastern European contexts, too, stories of manipulation and deceit (whether factual or not) frequently go hand in hand with invocations of twentieth-century episodes, their enduring effects, and the (subterranean) threats they might continue to pose. In Bulgaria, the popular HBO miniseries Chernobyl (2019) has recently triggered renewed academic and political debates on the nuclear disaster’s “secret causes” and on alleged cover-up activities by the Bulgarian Communist Party. In Poland the death of President Lech Kaczyński in a 2010 plane crash near Smolensk provoked, in the years that followed, a flood of conspiracy stories that knitted together disparate historical traumas into a larger pattern of secret Soviet/Russian scheming against the Polish nation, theories that have gained renewed traction after the Russian military invasion of Ukraine.

Details

Bringing together researchers from different fields and focusing on Eastern Europe, this workshop will also explore the interplay between memory and conspiracy culture beyond the region. Its premise is that conspiracy theories never occur in a historical vacuum. They lean on narratives from, and about, the past; they tap into sedimented layers of shared affect; and they mobilize pre-existing traditions of interpretation and imagination. Thus, “conspiratorial memory” is by no means unique to the post-socialist realm, as some of the papers will show. Participants also will address methodological issues pertaining to the study of (online) conspiracy culture, and will (self-) critically interrogate the researcher’s positionality toward the “conspiracy theories” they study. Does that derogatory label not imply that one knows how things actually stand? And can anyone claim such epistemological certainty at a moment when some of the most outlandish theories have violently manifested themselves before our eyes?

Participants & presentation titles

• Maria Plichta, Anna Greszta, Boris Noordenbos (organizers, University of Amserdam)
• Nelly Bekus (University of Exeter): “The Interplay of National and Transnational Memory Scripts During the Belarusian Protests”
• Todor Hristov (University of Sofia) – “The Absent Cause: A Bulgarian Debate on the Inadequate Response to the Chernobyl Crisis”
• Peter Knight (University of Manchester) – “‘Do Your Own Research!’: Conspiracy Theories and the Internet”
• Ilya Yablokov (University of Sheffield) – “The Madman’s Evolution: How Conspiracy Theories Destroyed Modern Russia”
• Mykola Makhortykh (University of Bern) – “Remembering Conspiracies or Conspiring Memories? Conspiratorial Memory and the Securitisation of the Russian invasion in Ukraine”
• Jaron Harambam (VU, Amsterdam) – “Putin’s Apologists: How Dutch Conspiracy Theorists Position Themselves Against the Geopolitical Demonization of Russia”
• Ellen Rutten (University of Amsterdam) – “Memory, Conflict and Post-Socialist Media: Old Stories, New Questions”
• Magdalena Saryusz Wolska (German Historical Institute Warsaw) – “What Do Images Do with History? A View on The Right-Wing Visual Sphere in Poland”
• Ela Drążkiewicz (Slovak Academy of Sciences) – “On Planes, Trains and Politics: The Role of Conspiracy Theories in Polish Political Culture”
• Matthias Schwartz (Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung) – “Servants of the People. Populism, Entertainment and Conspiracy in Eastern European Popular Culture(s)”
• Aleksey Kamenskikh (Centre for East-European Studies, Bremen) – “Constructing the Image of the Enemy: The Retrospective Dimensions of Anti-Ukrainian Putinist Propaganda”

Credit Specification

Assignments for rMA students to obtain ECTS (pass/fail):
– 1 EC: readings, attendance (both days), preparatory questions.
– 2 EC: readings, attendance (both days), reflection essay (max. 500 words).
If you have any questions, please send an email to conspiratorialmemory@gmail.com.