The surge and re-emergence of populist politics across Europe has profound effects on social spheres and institutions, including on museums and heritage. Due to heritage’s identity-building capacities, it can become both a resource and a tool for supporting populist politics, exclusionary identity-making and polarizing “grammars of belonging” (Niklasson 2023). Populist parties such as the Alternative for Germany, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, or the National Front in France instrumentalize and appropriate cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible, material and immaterial, for political purposes (Blokker 2022; Kaya 2020, 2021; Reynié 2016). The populist use of the past acts as a form of selective storytelling and representation that can instrumentalize, appropriate and intervene in sites of cultural heritage, including monuments, memorials, street names, public iconography, (lived) heritage and archaeological sites, and museums, for the purpose of constructing an imaginary ‘people,’ e.g., a nation, characterized by grandeur, unity, and harmony. Populism works through the articulation and performance of a collective political identity – ‘we’ – that stands in a strong polar opposition to another collective identity that is ‘not us’ in a way that is normatively charged.

Instances of instrumentalization and intervention into heritage and museums have been most visible in populist-led countries, such as Poland under the government of the populist Law and Justice Party (PiS, 2016–2023). In the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, for example, the Polish government installed a new director in order to redesign the museum’s exhibition in a way that fit the new national policy to promote a glorified version of Polish history. Similar developments have been observable in Turkey, Hungary, Slovenia, and the Netherlands (Balkenhol & Modest 2020; Bozoglu 2020; Kazlauskaitė 2022; Ugur Cinar & Altınok 2021). Museums have sometimes been the target of (in some cases violent) attacks, for example, when they emphasize cultural, social and religious diversity (Macdonald 2023). Museums can also become unwittingly
caught up in the constellation of populist practices, supporting nationalist agendas by, for example, reproducing binaries and polarizations between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that populist politics thrive on.

This final conference of the international research project 'Challenging Populist Truth-Making in Europe: The Role of Museums in a Digital ‘Post-Truth’ European Society' (CHAPTER, funded by VolkswagenStiftung) will further explore how the growing influence of populist politics affects museums in Europe, and what this entails for people working in the field of heritage and museums. The three-day-conference will include a keynote, panels, roundtable discussions, and presentations of the main results of the CHAPTER project. It will also include the release of the CHAPTER museum app, which offers digital interactions and tours through exhibitions in Berlin, Krakow, and London that aim to inspire young visitors to critically engage with populist truth-making. We welcome further contributions from researchers, practitioners and activists from all disciplines and fields of heritage practice.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:
– contexts and conditions of populist practices in the field of heritage and museums – entanglements of populism with memory, heritage, and museums
– case studies of political interferences, instrumentalization and appropriation
– challenges for museums, heritage sites, and similar institutions
– counter-strategies to populism
– complicity and implicatedness of museums (and museum workers) in populist politics
– digital dimensions of populist practices in the field of heritage and museums
– digital tools (apps, web sites, social media activities) that challenge populist truth-making in the context of heritage and museums

Submission of abstracts:
Please send abstracts (max. 300 words) as an attached file to julia.leser@hu-berlin.de by March 10, 2024. Please include your full name, position and affiliation. Applicants will be notified of the outcome of the review process by the end of April.