To Örebro University

The process of strategically redefining key liberal-democratic and other widely accepted social and political concepts by the far-right and other illiberal actors has recently become a widespread, cross-national phenomenon. Seeing it as integral to both the ongoing mainstreaming of the far right and the ever more pervasive, social-wide normalisation of illiberalism, we define this process as "conceptual flipsiding" and elaborate on it here from a set of interdisciplinary perspectives and in various contexts. We view "conceptual flipsiding" as the key component of illiberal "discursive shifts" in the public sphere that facilitate durable infusion of illiberalism into public discourse by changing the ways of speaking and thinking about key social and political ideas and issues. Exploring both theoretically and empirically the multiple dynamics, trajectories and intricacies of "conceptual flipsiding," we approach it as a strategic process wherein various public actors contribute to the ongoing illiberal discursive colonisation of liberal-democratic and key social and political concepts. Through our analyses of the discourse-conceptual dynamics surrounding the "conceptual flipsiding", we observe it as a long-lasting process wherein many of the (once) widely accepted core meanings of key liberal-democratic and other socio-political concepts are not only persistently diluted or weakened but often outright replaced with "new", illiberal understandings that eventually persist in both public discourse and in public imagination.

This article highlights the increasingly prevalent process of so-called“ conceptual flipsiding”: that is, of strategic reversal of notions once closely associated with liberal democracy, and of its key values of freedom, equality, tolerance, and the like, for the pronouncedly illiberal gains. Viewing the said process as part and parcel of the wider normalization of an illiberal imagination through strategic discourses and practices in and beyond the field of politics, the article contends that conceptual flipsiding increasingly allows recontextualizing and eventually normalizing a deeply illiberal understanding of polity, society, and community. Seeing these as increasingly redefined in recent years in many formerly liberal-democratic contexts by, especially, the far right and its numerous affiliates in politics, media, and/or un-civil society, the article argues for theoretical and analytical elaboration of conceptual flipsiding in order to depict its wider exploratory usability in grasping the current illiberal conceptual and discursive fluidity. The article emphasizes that, following the discourse-conceptual logic behind the conceptual flipsiding dynamics, one is able to deconstruct the ongoing infusion of key social and political concepts and discourses with new and often deeply illiberal understandings.

This study analyses of the Living Memorial: a counter-monumental installation located since 2014 in the highly contested Szabadság (‘Liberty’) Square in central Budapest, Hungary. The focus on the LM allows showcasing it as a unique type of commemorative installation that not only contests the current Hungarian top-down, hegemonic narrations and practices of memory but also counteracts the country’s politicised and ideologised narrations of the past. The LM is explored as a dialogical ‘nexus’ of, on the one hand, individual, lived experiences of the Holocaust in Hungary in 1944–45 and, on the other, of the wider historical and contemporary socio-historical narratives as well as commemorating practices. Presented in the article – and set against the wider input from memory and commemoration research – the systematic, discourse-ethnographic analysis of the Living Memorial links its discursive and visual as well as spatial aspects with the exploration of various types of spectator engagement. In doing so, the article connects the wider context of memory and commemoration in the national and city spaces – and specifically in the often strongly politicised capital milieus – to the specific, localised contexts of ‘commemorative battlegrounds’ wherein ‘official’ displays of memory clash with, and are opposed by, their bottom-up, counterhegemonic contestations. 

This position paper argues for an interdisciplinary agenda relating crises to on-going processes of normalization of anti- and post-democratic action. We call for exploring theoretically and empirically the ‘new normal’ logic introduced into public imagination on the back of various crises, including the recent ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Europe, COVID-19 pandemic, or the still ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Gathering researchers of populism, extremism, discrimination, and other formats of anti- and post-democratic action, we propose investigating how, why, and under which conditions, discourses and practices underlying normalization processes re-emerge to challenge the liberal democratic order. We argue exploring the multiple variants of ‘the new normal’ related to crises, historically and more recently. We are interested in how and why these open pathways for politics of exclusion, inequality, xenophobia and other patterns of anti- and post-democratic action while deepening polarization and radicalization of society as well as propelling far-right politics and ideologies.

This study analyses of the Living Memorial: a counter-monumental installation located since 2014 in the highly contested Szabadság (‘Liberty’) Square in central Budapest, Hungary. The focus on the LM allows showcasing it as a unique type of commemorative installation that not only contests the current Hungarian top-down, hegemonic narrations and practices of memory but also counteracts the country’s politicised and ideologised narrations of the past. The LM is explored as a dialogical ‘nexus’ of, on the one hand, individual, lived experiences of the Holocaust in Hungary in 1944–45 and, on the other, of the wider historical and contemporary socio-historical narratives as well as commemorating practices. Presented in the article – and set against the wider input from memory and commemoration research – the systematic, discourse-ethnographic analysis of the Living Memorial links its discursive and visual as well as spatial aspects with the exploration of various types of spectator engagement. In doing so, the article connects the wider context of memory and commemoration in the national and city spaces – and specifically in the often strongly politicised capital milieus – to the specific, localised contexts of ‘commemorative battlegrounds’ wherein ‘official’ displays of memory clash with, and are opposed by, their bottom-up, counterhegemonic contestations.

This article highlights how the recent discourse of 'the new normal' - re-initiated and widely used in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in national and international media and political discourse - marks the advent of a new approach to 'crisis' in the normalisation of far-right populist politics. Drawing on the example of the analysis of 'policy communication' genres pre-legitimising the Polish right-wing populist government's recent actions aimed at curtailing media freedom and controlling opposition media, the article shows that, in the context of an undisputed crisis such as the recent pandemic, the right-wing populist imagination has gradually and strategically altered its usual, highly ambivalent approach to crisis. However, the latter's new, (quasi) 'factual' imaginary has, as is shown, become a tool in the further escalation and normalisation of far-right political strategies and policies, especially with regard to new far right strategies of media control aimed at the systemic colonisation of the wider public sphere. Therein, as the article shows, far-right actors often resort to a very peculiar - and by now common - adoption of many pro-democratic arguments while 'flipsiding' them in favour of far-right arguments and pre-legitimising their own undemocratic politics of control and exclusion.

This paper critically explores how contemporary practices of commercialised self-mediation by "celebrity mothers" increasingly normalise a strongly commodified and consumption-driven vision of motherhood. Drawing on the affordances of mediatisation and self-mediation embedded in the wider neoliberal and celebrity culture mindset, the article analyses how motherhood becomes increasingly linked, in public discourses, to economic relations of acquiring or gaining material goods - rather than being viewed as a socially or individually significant process or role. Looking at mediated discourses in Sweden and Poland, the paper shows how, over time, strong commodity and product orientation becomes a major feature characterising "good" mothers but also a fundamental way of expressing contemporary maternal identities and emotions. However, in doing so, the ever more hegemonic discourse of the commodification of motherhood normalises the wider vision of motherhood as set within a strictly consumption-related mindset founded on social and material status - closely associated with the affluent middle-class - whilst ideologically and tacitly excluding women and mothers who cannot follow discursively constructed celebrity-like lifestyles or patterns of consumption.

The aim of this essay is to sketch the evolution of Polish critical art on womanhood in general and motherhood in particular. The overall argument is that both before and after 1989 – marking the major point of accelerating socio-political transformation and social change in Poland - critical women artists were exceptionally outspoken about the tensions related to motherhood. They have done so while depicting mothers’ complex subjectivity as well as mothering practices through and within art practices. The focus of this paper is, specifically, on three generations of Polish women-artists along with looking in-depth at how their critical-artistic discourse, both before and after 1989, has constructed various ideas, visions and perceptions of motherhood, both from the women-centred and the wider social perspective.

This essay illustrates the extent to which crisis has had an impact on public perceptions and discourses of contemporary migration in Poland. We focus on the actual moment of the coming together' between crisis- and immigration-related discourses and argue that this connection has arisen as part of the recent political strategies of Poland's right-wing populist government Law and Justice' (PiS) party. The strong anti-immigration and anti-refugee rhetoric orchestrated by PiS across the Polish public sphere has also played a pivotal role in countenancing xenophobic as well as outright racist sentiments in wider Polish public discourse and society.