Populism, Propaganda and Pop Culture

Prof. Dr. Marcus Stiglegger teaches film and cultural studies at the university of Freiburg and the Muenster School of Design. He received his doctorate with the dissertation Sadiconzista - Fascism and Sexuality in Film and habilitated in 2005 with the monograph Ritual and Seduction, in which he developed the seduction theory of film. He writes regularly for film magazines such as film-Dienst and epd Film and founded the magazine Ikonen. He is also a musician, writes screenplays and runs the podcast Projektionen. With the participation of: Anuška Delić, Dr. Gregor Moder, Bernhard Winkler, M.A.

Anuška Delić is an investigative and data journalist who leads a unique two-headed microregional nonprofit investigative journalism center, Oštro in Slovenia and Oštro in Croatia. She is also a Balkans regional editor with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
She established “The MEPs Project” which brought together journalists that represented all 28 EU member states. As a member of ground-breaking global investigations, such as the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, FinCEN Files and The Laundromats she is a co-recipient of several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize on Explanatory Reporting.
 
Dr. Gregor Moder is philosopher and scholar. He studied philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and received his doctorate in 2009 with a comparative thesis on Hegel and Spinoza. During his studies, he also worked as an actor and as the artistic director of theater projects. He spent research stays at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht and at the Universities of Cambridge and Princeton. Moder is a lecturer at his alma mater and specializes in political philosophy, metaphysics, ideological criticism and the philosophy of art.
 
Bernhard Winkler, M.A. is a DAAD lecturer in the German Program. His research focuses on German literature in Romanticism and Modernity. His current work focuses on erotic discourses in contemporary literature. He studied at the University of Regensburg, the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and the University of Colorado at Boulder where he also taught as Teaching Assistant. He worked for two years as DAAD assistant at ELTE Budapest before starting his DAAD lectorate at University of Ljubljana.

In our project, we want to analyse and reveal the roots of new right-wing thinking in order to assess and deconstruct the manipulative power of these media that threaten democracy. Our guest Marcus Stiglegger is an expert in film studies and popular culture studies. Since propaganda and populism today are constructed and disseminated particularly through images, memes, films and other pop-cultural products, it is necessary to analyse the myths and methods used by the Identitarian movement, for example, to make their worldview attractive to young people. Awareness of the seductive structures of propaganda and populism should provide guests with politically relevant knowledge in order to question ideologies and to recognize and expose practical pop-cultural propaganda strategies in everyday life. Especially in light of recent political developments, disinformation strategies will be exposed that blur the difference between fact and fiction, thereby appealing to an audience susceptible to the totalitarian structure of such propaganda.

By exposing the pop-cultural mythical roots, the aim is to sensitize the audience to the manipulative tendencies of new-right ideologies that use social media in a global context to recruit followers.

In cooperation with the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, Austrian Cultural Forum, and Goethe-Institut Ljubljana.