The contemporary far right does not circulate only through political parties, electoral campaigns, manifestos or explicitly political social media accounts. Reactionary ideas are increasingly embedded within the cultural and aesthetic content of everyday life: in discussions about fashion, music, architecture, beauty, gender, family, heritage, lifestyle and popular culture. In these spaces, political ideas may appear not as politics at all, but as matters of taste, common sense, tradition, authenticity or a desire to return to a supposedly better past.
Social media platforms have become particularly important sites for this process. Algorithmically mediated environments blur the boundaries between political communication, entertainment and lifestyle content, allowing ideas associated with the far right to circulate beyond explicitly political communities. Narratives of cultural decline, lost tradition, natural social hierarchies, idealised gender roles, national identity and nostalgia for an imagined past can consequently reach audiences through content whose apparent subject may be a building, an outfit, a song, a family home or an aesthetic preference.
This panel invites papers examining how reactionary and far-right ideas are produced, coded, aestheticised, circulated and normalised through everyday culture, with particular interest in digital and social media. Rather than focusing exclusively on formal far-right organisations or explicitly ideological discourse, the panel asks how political worldviews become embedded within apparently non-political cultural practices and aesthetic judgements.
We welcome interdisciplinary and comparative contributions examining areas including architecture and urbanism, fashion, music, visual culture, heritage, domesticity, gender and family, lifestyle and influencer cultures, memes and digital subcultures, among others. Contributions might consider the role of nostalgia, tradition, beauty, authenticity and narratives of decline; the movement of ideas between fringe political communities and mainstream culture; the role of algorithms and platforms in facilitating these encounters; and the extent to which everyday cultural content can contribute to the normalisation of anti-democratic or exclusionary ideas.
By bringing these perspectives together, the panel seeks to better understand how contemporary reactionary politics operates beyond conventional political arenas, and how the boundaries between culture, identity, aesthetics and political ideology are being reshaped in the digital age.
