Zentrum für Mittelmeerstudien der Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Web)

Venue: Bochum, ZMS
Time: March 21, 2019
Proposals by: February 15, 2019

The connections between populist radical parties, migration, and gender rights attract growing research interest today. It is mainly because the populist radical right parties of Western Europe attempt to revolutionise their party politics from the 1990s and reformulate themselves in liberal and secular terms. On the one hand, in a Europe breaking away from the ideological constraints of the Cold War and leaning towards economic and political liberalism, party politics converged, political identities became increasingly overlapping, and national populisms consequently sought to adapt to the changing political landscape. On the other hand, this ‘liberal’ turn allowed the radical populist right parties to maintain their oppositions to migration by manipulating liberalism and minority rights, as they stigmatised migration to be a phenomenon between receiving liberal democracies in relation to illiberal migrant communities.

Conceptualisations of gender issues by the populist radical right are evidently related to the above-mentioned oppositions to migration in liberal terms. Today, particularly the national populisms of Western Europe present certain rights of gender to be under threat of migration from the countries dominated by Islamic faith. These gender-protective oppositions to Islam yet objectify and sexualise woman body eminently, and this way they still bring to mind the traditional populist views assigning given roles to gender.

The workshop, planned as one-day public event, aims to give insights into how the populist radical right parties of Europe come to terms with gender, and what historical and countrybased motivations exist behind their gender-protective arguments. To this end, it aims to gather theoretical and empirical contributions that address a number of issues including but not limited to:

• Incorporations of gender issues into anti-migrant discourses
• Women’s rights, family, and LGBTI groups in right-wing populism today
• Relationships between populist radical right parties and feminist groups
• Comparisons between right-wing populist parties in their gendered discourses on migration
• Contemporary Gender Images drawn by Radical Populisms outside Europe

The organisers of the workshop are intent on finalising the entire academic work in a volume edition for a journal or publishing house under the initiation of a scientific committee selected from the participants. The participants also confirm their interest in contributing to the overall academic work and the future publication.

Interested in taking part? Please send your application along with a short outline of your topic of interest/contribution before February 15, 2019 to caner.tekin@rub.de