Papers are invited for an international conference at the University of Warsaw on 8–10 December 2022 on the theme ‘The Fantasy–Reality Continuum: Science, Religion, Politics, Culture’. Under the auspices of the Norbert Elias Foundation, the steering group for the conference consists of Marta Bucholc (University of Warsaw), Valerie Dahl (Universität Münster), Marta Gospodarczyk (University of Warsaw), Jason Hughes (University of Leicester), Katie Liston (Ulster University), Stephen Mennell (University College Dublin). The conference will be face-to-face (on-site) in Warsaw with some sessions online.

The topic

The idea of the fantasy–reality continuum plays a key part in Norbert Elias’s sociological theory of knowledge and the sciences. The struggle to achieve relatively more ‘reality congruent’ knowledge has been closely bound up with long-term civilising processes, and notably the gradual reduction of levels of everyday danger and corresponding fears. The gathering pace of the natural sciences involved breaking religions’ historic monopoly over the means of orientation. At the same time, the social organisation of the sciences brought with it relatively strong controls over the scope of fantasy, with the curbs on emotion and fantasy were relatively weaker in the realm of politics, and weaker still in the field of cultural creativity.

All this has suddenly become of great contemporary practical and political relevance. The curbs on the free exercise of fantasy have seemed suddenly to be much weaker, and fears are on the rise. As indeed so have, in politics especially, the curbs on untruthfulness: is it now more possible to ‘get away’ with consciously telling lies, possibly with the intention of promoting fantastic beliefs for other people? Examples abound that it is less possible than before to take for granted the effectiveness of social controls over standards of evidence and truth in debates, be it over military aggression parading as self-defense or the unfulfillable campaign promises ending in disasters. Even hard scientific expertise has been affected, as witness for example the denial of climate change and the strength of ‘anti-vax’ fantasies.

Softer scholarly contributions to our knowledge about human societies past and present also face severe challenges by revisionists, reformers and revolutionaries. Among those are the pursuers of historical politics and politics of memory marked by ressentiment, striving to reverse the arrow of time, and fundamentalists, seeking to establish new utopias in lieu of the old ones such as the human rights.

In all this, the new social media have apparently played a decisive part. At first seen as a possible step towards greater democratisation of knowledge production and dissemination, they also appear to have fostered in some quarters an extreme individualistic belief that ‘anything goes’. The Janus nature of an apparently limitless human communication has seldom become so evident.

We hope this topic will stimulate the whole wide range of contributions from scholars of any theoretical and methodological orientation coming from social sciences and humanities, including sociology, economy, history, cultural studies, literary studies, gender studies, migration studies, political science, international relations, theology, and law. It is our goal to bring social-scientific understanding of long-term history processes to bear on the shifts in the fantasy–reality continuum in today’s world. It is anticipated that the conference will comprise five streams, including, apart from a general one, streams on science, religion, politics, and culture, for which the following list of indicative subjects is suggested as a starting point for the contributors’ consideration.