We are pleased to have Professor Simon Winlow from Northumbria Criminology present at our next seminar, all are welcome to attend.
Date: Wednesday 9th of May, 3:30 to 5:00 in Northumberland Building, Room 348
If you would like to attend, please email either Emma (emma.h.casey@northumbria.ac.uk) or Edmund (edmund.coleman-fountain@northumbria.ac.uk)
The abstract for his talk is below:
Title: Rise of the Right: Understanding the Rise of Ethnocentric Nationalism
In recent years right-wing populism has risen significantly across the west. In 2017, Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, came very close to winning the French presidential election. She eventually lost out to Emanuel Macron, a man dedicated to maintaining the neoliberal consensus but smart enough to voice the usual progressive liberal platitudes during his election campaign. If this was a victory for liberalism over an increasingly virulent and regressive nationalism, it rang rather hallow. The huge strides made by the National Front under Le Pen, quite clearly, do not augur well for the continuation of liberal values in Europe. However, it seems quite important to ask why a representative of the dominant politico-economic order was presented to the electorate as the alternative to the ethnocentric nationalism currently pulling France to the right. Can Macron’s unmitigated neoliberalism assuage the anger and anxiety that underpin the new French nationalism? Does the invidious choice between Le Pen and Macron not tell us something about the parlous state of liberal democracy and the chains that have been placed upon our collective political imagination? Might the continued dominance of neoliberal capitalism – which has throughout the west concentrated wealth in the hands of an oligarchic elite and permeated economic insecurity throughout the rest of the population – have in some way influenced the development of this new right-wing populism? And perhaps more to the point, shouldn’t we be asking searching questions about why the political right has been the principal beneficiary of post-crash economic insecurity, stagnating wages, declining lifestyles, austerity and the gradual breakup of the west’s welfare states? Why has there not been a resurgence of interest in traditional left-wing politics rooted in political economy and committed to advancing the interests of the multi-ethnic working class? Using some of the data and theory presented in Rise of the Right: English Nationalism and the Transformation of Working-Class Politics (2017, Policy), I will explore the rise of ethnocentric nationalism and identify some of the reasons why the historical relationship the working class and the political left has become strained and at risk of breaking down all together.
Simon Winlow is Professor of Criminology at Northumbria University. He is the author of Badfellas: Crime, Tradition and New Masculinities (2001, Berg) and co-author of Bouncers: Violence and Governance in the Night-time Economy (2003, Oxford University Press), Violent Night: Urban Leisure and Contemporary Culture (2006, Berg), Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: Crime, Exclusion and the New Culture of Narcissism (2008, Willan), Rethinking Social Exclusion: The End of the Social? (2012, Sage), Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Towards a New Ultra-Realism (2015, Routledge), Riots and Political Protest: Notes from the Post-Political Present (2015, Routledge) and Rise of the Right: English Nationalism and the Transformation of Working-Class Politics (2017, Policy).