About the Lecture: In this book presentation, Agnieszka Pasieka will draw from her fieldwork among Italian, Polish, and Hungarian militant youths, painting unforgettable portraits of students, laborers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and activists from well-off middle-class backgrounds who have all found a nurturing home in the far right. Providing an in-depth account of radical nationalist communities and networks that are taking root across Europe, she shows how the simultaneous orientation of these groups toward the local and the transnational is a key to their success. With a focus on far-right morality that challenges commonly held ideas about the right, Pasieka describes how far-right movements afford opportunities to the young to be active members of tightly bonded comradeships while sharing in a broader project with global ramifications.
About the Speaker:
Agnieszka Pasieka, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Montreal, is a sociocultural anthropologist. Her scholarship pursues two interrelated lines of inquiry. The first one makes central the question of difference, broadly understood, and examines the relationship between top-down and grassroots understandings of pluralism. The second line on inquiry focuses on political mobilization, activism and social movements, and explores how different social actors mobilize and what kind of alternative world they envision. Her most recent book is Living right: Politics, morality and youth far-right militancy in contemporary Europe, published by Princeton University Press in 2024.
Before joining the University of Montreal, Agnieszka worked as senior research fellow at the University of Vienna and held guest lecturer and guest professor positions at various universities: Central European University, University of Bayreuth, Dartmouth College, and Yale University. She joined the Department in September 2024 and she is working on establishing a social movements lab. She is also initiating two new research projects: the first one focuses on activism around climate change, including the hitherto understudied question of far-right environmentalism. The second project tackles contrasting ideas and practices of solidarity in the context of welfare retrenchment.
This event is part of the CREECA lecture series, which is held on Thursdays at 4:00 pm. Coffee, tea, and cookies served starting at 3:45.