Faculty Webinars & Keynotes

Ferruh Yilmaz is Associate Professor at the Department of Communications, Tulane University, New Orleans.

In my perspective, provoking sustained moral panics about perceived enemies is central to the populist far right rhetorical strategy. The success of the populist far-right depends on the existence of an external threat to the well-being of ‘the people’. A continuous series of public controversies and moral panics are necessary for producing the experience of an ongoing crisis. The far-right actors are often—though not always—the initiators of these crises.

This presentation will look at the controversies or moral panics about race, gender, and culture in academic curriculum in different countries: the moral panics about “academic activism” in Denmark (about race and gender), “critical race theory” in the US and Australia, and the so-called “Islamo-leftism” in France. The inciters of these panics often draw on both progressive and conservative arguments while attacking the “politicization of universities.” The tragi-interesting part of the assault on race, gender and postcolonial research is that it has found support from both left and right. In France, Macron condemned these researchers for splitting the country into two basically falling in line with the far right. In Denmark, the Social Democratic government joined the fray against academic research on race and gender. In the US, 23 states already passed laws forbidding critical race theory in public schools.

This presentation takes these moral panics as the typical examples of far-right populist rhetorical strategy that has managed to change the ontological vision of societies, by making race, gender and thus culture the central terrain on which social divisions are imagined and sanctioned.