7 October 2010

Fascist Radicalism and the New Media - podcasts

Fascist Radicalism and the New Media Symposium

Podcasts and presentations, by Backdoor Broadcasting Company -

Welcome (MP3)
- Doug Rae, Associate Dean of School of Social Sciences
- Dr Matthew Feldman, Director of the Radicalism and New Media Group

Keynote Talk: Gerry Gable (MA Crim.), Searchlight Magazine
‘Confronting Right-Wing Extremism in a Western Democracy’

Panel 1: New Media and the Resurgent British Fascism (Chair: Matthew Feldman)
- Dr Paul Jackson, University of Northampton: ‘The English Defence League and Far-Right Politics’
- Trevor Preston, University of Northampton: ‘From Billboard to Broadband: Cyber-Terrorism and the Extreme Right Wing’
- Benedict Addis, HP Labs: ‘Covert communities: How the Internet Fosters Extremism’

Panel 2: New Media and European Fascisms (Chair: Paul Jackson)
- Dr Matthew Feldman, University of Northampton: ‘Universal Nazism in Britain: The Case of the Aryan Strike Force’
- Dr Anna Castriota, University of Cardiff: ‘Julius Evola on the Web: The Fascist Ideal of “Europe as Aryanland”’
- Dr Anton Shekhovtsov, University of Northampton: ‘Far-Right Music in Europe: Songs of Hate and Devotion’

Panel 3: Practitioners on the Far-Right (Chair: Paul Jackson)
- East Midlands Community Contact Unit: ‘Experiences of a Regional Intervention Unit in Addressing Violent Extremism’
- Durham Constabulary: ‘Operation CONSTELLATION – The Right Wing Threat’

Concluding Discussion and Closing Remarks (Chair: Matthew Feldman) (MP3)

3 October 2010

Modernism and Eugenics

The first volume in the recently established book series "Modernism and..." (edited by Roger Griffin) is out -

Marius Turda, Modernism and Eugenics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)




Is the nation an 'imagined community' centered on culture or rather a biological community determined by heredity? Modernism and Eugenics examines this question from a bifocal perspective. On the one hand, it looks at technologies through which the individual body was re-defined eugenically by a diverse range of European scientists and politicians between 1870 and 1940; on the other, it illuminates how the national community was represented by eugenic discourses that strove to battle a perceived process of cultural decay and biological degeneration. In the wake of a renewed interest in the history of science and fascism, Modernism and Eugenics treats the history of eugenics not as distorted version of crude social Darwinism that found its culmination in the Nazi policies of genocide but as an integral part of European modernity, one in which the state and the individual embarked on an unprecedented quest to renew an idealized national community.