Lab for Character Assassination and Reputation Politics (CARP) 2025 Conference (Web)

Time: 20.-22.03.2025
Venue:: George Mason Univ.’s Arlington Campus
Proposals by: 10.10.2024

Character assassination is the deliberate destruction of an individual’s reputation. This timeless phenomenon appears in many shapes and forms in every cultural, political, and technological era. Various character assassination practices such as lies, insinuations and ridicule have been effective means of persuasion and influence in power struggles for centuries. As a field of scholarship, the study of character assassination has been experiencing a remarkable academic renaissance. Given that character assassination appears in struggles for power, it should not surprise us that character assassins grab any tools at their disposal to gain the upper hand over opponents. Gender often provides an angle for character assassination. Gendered character attacks typically accuse a target of acting in a way that is inappropriate for their gendered identity. This may involve accusing a male politician of being “wimpy” or suggesting that a female politician is acting in a masculine or aggressive manner when she takes decisive action. Of course, what counts as appropriate gendered behavior is culturally and historically specific. It is also intersected by class, sexuality, and race.
The organisers invite scholars and practitioners to submit research and works in progress which will discuss character assassination, gender, power, and politics from a variety of disciplinary and cultural angles. They welcome both theoretical work and case studies that explore this phenomenon across the globe and throughout history.

Possible Topics:
– Current cases of character attacks on female politicians
– Historical cases of gender-based attacks in politics
– The role of gender in negative political campaigns
– Political incivility and gender-based political ads
– Media coverage of gender in political campaigns
– The role of gender in political scandals
– Gender-based practices of ridicule in comedy shows
– Memes, caricatures, and visual misinformation
– The rhetoric of social media canceling
– Gender in international relations and diplomacy
– Responding to gendered character attacks
– Reputation management, image repair, and inoculation strategies Continue reading →

Seventh Annual HEX Conference 2025 (Web)

Time: 10.-12.03.2025
Venue: Tampere Univ., Finland
Proposals by: 29.11.2024

The history of experiences is a burgeoning, interdisciplinary field of study that sets out to comprehend the manifold roles and meanings of experience in history. It charts the dynamic interplay between the individual, community, and society at large. The history of experiences reconsiders how experience is defined and used as a key element of historiographical practice. Historians of experience highlight the generative role of experience in shaping history and its vital importance to any comprehensive historical analysis. Rather than as an isolated, extraneous facet of historical study, experience is most fruitfully studied as situated within social structures and institutions, with which it is in constant interaction. Experience is deeply intertwined with the fabric of culture, and understanding cultural change requires examining experience within its context.Historians of experience constantly develop the approaches and concepts central to their field. They interrogate the specificities of their domain and self-reflectively ask how it is situated in the wider historiographical context. New sources help unravel the multilayered historicity of experience.
Within this framework, the seventh annual HEX Conference will reassess the premises on which this field rests and consider what historicizing experience entails. How is experience produced, and why is it crucial to understand it as a historical process?

The organisers invite proposals for papers and panels that span a range of periods, methodologies, and disciplines with only one, all-encompassing methodical goal in mind: historicizing experiences. By encouraging diverse contributions, they aim to create a forum that engages in discussion about the state of the field through conceptual case studies and more theoretically oriented reflections. Read more and source … (Web)

Source: H-Net Notifications