Conservative Public History
Online workshop
20 June 2024
Call for Contributions
Across the world right-wing popular political movements are harnessing the past as a means for attacking and challenging liberal consensus. From the infiltration work of Restore Trust in the UK to the legislative attacks of Florida republicans, work in this area is increasingly purposeful and well organised.
Whilst conservative popular history is hardly new, increasingly the ‘weaponization’ of the past has become programmatic and performative. As neoliberal think tanks and groups increasingly collaborate and share practice, method and funding in their resistance to progressive institutions and research, attacks on historical understanding are becoming organised. Historical knowledge production and distribution is becoming strategically addressed by various groups. Conservative approaches to history in public are becoming more performative and need to be understood to be countered.
What does this mean for an understanding of public history? How is the past in public becoming utilised by right-wing actors? What does this mean for an understanding of public history’s activist, liberal, progressive aspects? Does an understanding of public history as something innately conservative challenge our paradigms for work in this area? What is the theory and practice of right-wing public history?
This online workshop seeks to understand this phenomenon in a global context. We are looking for short 10-minute contributions articulating the new ‘practice’ of conservative public history and its consequences.
Please send 100-word abstracts to Jerome de Groot, Jerome.degroot@manchester.ac.uk by 7 Dec 2023.
Histories At Risk 