Extremist Mythologies - 11th annual WiCDS conference
| When: | Tuesday, 14 October 2025 - Thursday, 16 October 2025 |
| Where: | South West Engineering Building Braamfontein Campus East |
| Start time: | 9:00 |
| Enquiries: | Contact Ditebogo.Kalauba@wits.ac.za for further information. |
The Wits Centre for Diversity Studies is pleased to annouce its 11th annual conference, 'Extremist Mythologies'
Please join us at the Humanities Graduate Centre from 14-16 October 2025, alongside featured speakers Achille Mbembe, Ryan Bishop, Atiqa Hachimi and Haley McEwen.
Much contemporary scholarship and public conversation are concerned with the rise of populism and extremism, their causes as well as their consequences. Less attention has been paid to the particular ways in which extremist political positions support and mainstream themselves, and how they activate sameness and difference as part of their symbolic arsenal. Even those extremisms which appear more rational or humane, or more in line with our personal belief systems, utilise a conceptual scaffolding to maintain their appeal. This interdisciplinary conference is interested in the narratives, discourses, symbols, myths and images that are pervasive throughout contemporary cultural and political polarisation. It aims to ask not just why but also, from a granular perspective, how extremism is formed, marketed and transmitted, how it attains virality, how it uses myth to foster emotion.
Drawing on the concerns of Diversity Studies, which critically interrogates difference and power, this conference will discuss issues including, but not limited to:
- War, dictatorship and violence
- Scapegoating processes, from poverty to migration
- Racialisation and race talk
- Identity politics at extremes
- The demystification of liberation movements
- Desirable/undesirable disability
- Tradwives, slay queens and ‘new’ femininities
- The incelisation of big politics
- Polygamy, homophobia and conservative family values in Africa
- Extremist religion, from settler Zionism to prosperity gospels
- AI, algorithms and the rise of predatory media
- Dystopian and utopian visions of post/extremist futures
Partners in this event include the Innovation Foundation for Democracy, the Wits Research Office and the DST-NRF Bilateral Chair in Digital Humanities.
Add event to calendar