11 Aug
2025
11 Aug
'25
11:30 a.m.
Dear VDP Members,
You may be interested in this call. The organizers have made a number of
travel funds available.
Best,
Raphael
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: *Chiujdea, Mihnea* <mihnea.chiujdea(a)fu-berlin.de
<mailto:mihnea.chiujdea@fu-berlin.de>>
Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2025 at 10:32
Subject: Reminder: Race, Racism, and Racialisation in The European New
Right (Graduate Conference, 24 September, FU Berlin)
To: <philos-l(a)liv.ac.uk <mailto:philos-l@liv.ac.uk>>
Call for Abstracts
Graduate Conference
/*Race, Racism, and Racialisation in The European New Right*/
Freie Universität Berlin
Institute for Philosophy
24 September 2025
*Confirmed keynote speakers: Leerom Medovoi (University of Arizona), Urs
Lindner (University of Duisburg-Essen)***
**
This conference aims to develop new insights into the form of racism
promoted by the European New Right since 1945. As Étienne Balibar (1991)
observes, this period has seen a shift from biological to cultural
racism. In seeking greater acceptance within mainstream politics, the
New Right has adopted a defensive posture: its rhetoric frames
exclusionary politics as the protection of threatened groups rather than
aggression towards others.
A prominent example is the so‑called ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy
theory, which casts immigration and demographic change as an existential
threat to certain populations. Another is ethnopluralism, a doctrine
most famously associated with Alain de Benoist, but widely adopted
across far‑right networks in Europe and North America.
Ethnopluralism recasts biological races as ethnic groups imagined to
possess fixed, essential qualities central to collective and individual
well‑being. Despite abandoning the term ‘race’, it does not break with
the process of racialisation: populations remain essentialised,
geographically bounded, and often hierarchically ordered. Perceived
threats such as migration, globalisation, and capitalism are presented
as dangers to group integrity.
Marketed as a defence of diversity and autonomy of ethnic groups – even
as a rejection of racism, cultural superiority, and xenophobia –
ethnopluralism in practice legitimises cultural separatism,
civilisational chauvinism, and what Rueda (2021) calls a non‑biological
yet adaptive form of alterophobia and autophilia. By casting exclusion
as the preservation of difference, it functions as a strategic form of
cultural racism, readily embraced by movements that once endorsed
overtly racist views or political violence.
Focusing on ethnopluralism and the ‘Great Replacement’ theory, this
conference will explore how the New Right’s defensive racism operates.
What processes of racialisation does it involve, and what conception of
race emerges from them?
*We invite abstracts from graduate students and early career researchers
(within 2 years of their PhD) in philosophy and the social sciences.
*Possible questions include, but are not limited to:
·What implications for the social ontology or metaphysics of groups do
the New Right’s threat‑based conceptions carry? Do these approaches
offer the right theoretical tools for understanding what is distinctive
about ideologies such as ethnopluralism?
·How does ethnopluralism compare with other forms of alterophobia or
racism, given its claimed rejection of biological race?
·In the European context, some groups have been classified as ‘white’,
yet racialised nonetheless. Is there any qualitative difference between
speaking of ethnicities rather than races?
·‘Colour‑blind’ eliminativism – the rejection of race as a legitimate
category in public and academic discourse – has been argued to be a
distinctive feature of the European context (Bessone 2020; Ludwig 2020;
James et al. 2024). Are there continuities between this and the New
Right’s replacement of race with ethnicity?
·How should we interpret the New Right’s critique of capitalism, given
the close historical entanglement between racialisation and capitalist
development?
·US‑based scholars have explored the role of ‘threat’ in understanding
race (e.g. Goldberg 2008; Medovoi 2024). Do their insights apply to the
New Right, or does the latter’s ideology demand a different analytical
framework?
Participants will have up to 20 minutes to present their papers,
followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Presentations will be in English.
A small number of bursaries will be available to help cover travel costs
(paid as an honorarium). Priority will be given to those without
institutional support.
This graduate conference forms part of a three‑day event on race,
racialisation, and racism in the European context. Invited speakers for
the subsequent two days (25-26 September) include: Leda Berio
(University College Dublin), Daniel James (TU Dresden), Steffen Koch
(University of Bielefeld), Alex Wiegmann (University of Granada), Magali
Bessone (Université Paris 1 Panthéon‑Sorbonne), Lawrence Blum
(University of Massachusetts Boston), Esa Díaz León (University of
Barcelona), David Ludwig (Wageningen University), Joanna Karolina
Malinowska (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań), Marcello Maneri
(University of Milano‑Bicocca), Aleksandra Lewicki (University of
Sussex), Reza Mosayebi (Ruhr-Universität Bochum).
Submission guidelines: Please submit an abstract of up to 400 words by 7
September 2025. Send your abstract to mihnea.chiujdea(a)fu-berlin.de
<mailto:mihnea.chiujdea@fu-berlin.de>, with the subject line “Abstract”,
including your name, affiliation, a brief biographical note, and
information about any need for travel funding. Successful applicants
will be notified by 12 September.
Organiser: Mihnea Chiujdea, Freie Universität Berlin
Funding: German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space and
the State of Berlin, as part of the Excellence Strategy of the Federal
and State Governments, via the Berlin University Alliance.
--
Dr. des. Mihnea Chiujdea (Er/He)
Visiting Lecturer (Lehrbeauftragter)
Institut für Philosophie
Freie Universität Berlin
Habelschwerdter Allee 30
14195 Berlin
W: fu-berlin.academia.edu/MihneaChiujdea
<http://fu-berlin.academia.edu/MihneaChiujdea>