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Format, Location and Timing
The conference is planned as an in-person academic event featuring invited speakers and moderated discussions.
- Dates: April 30 - May 1 2026
- Location April 30-Room 210, Levis Faculty Center, May 1-Room 422, Levis Faculty Center
- Format: Panels, roundtable discussions...
Tentative Schedule:
Day 1 From 9:30 am - 5:30 pm
Day 2 From 9:30 am - 3:45 pm
Overview
This conference explores how discourses of health, safety, and bodily “normality” have been mobilized to justify exclusion, coercion, and violence in modern political life. Challenging the idea that fascism represents a rupture or historical aberration, the event approaches authoritarianism as an intensified and weaponized extension of everyday norms surrounding care, protection, and bodily integrity.
Using the concept of autoimmunity—a condition in which the body’s defense mechanisms turn against itself—the conference asks how contemporary far-right and authoritarian movements frame their projects not as extremism, but as protection. From racial hygiene and medicalized governance in the early twentieth century to wellness culture, environmental purity discourses, and nationalist health politics today, the event traces how the language of care is repeatedly repurposed to legitimize harm.
Key Questions and Themes
The conference is organized around a set of interrelated questions, including:
- How does the desire for a “healthy body” become a justification for violent or exclusionary state practices?
- In what ways do discourses of health, purity, and safety normalize authoritarian politics rather than mark them as exceptional?
- How have medical, environmental, and wellness narratives intersected with fascist and far-right ideologies historically and in the present?
- What continuities link racial hygiene projects of the 1930s to contemporary wellness pipelines and lifestyle-based extremism?
- How do these dynamics operate differently across Europe, the United States, and the Global South?
The conference brings together scholarship on fascism, biopolitics, race, medicine, environmentalism, and authoritarian governance to examine how bodies—individual and collective—become sites of political struggle.
Why This Conference Now?
Across multiple global contexts, authoritarian and far-right movements increasingly invoke the language of health, protection, and normality. Whether through appeals to organic purity, “strong national bodies,” or the defense of everyday life from perceived threats such as migration, diversity, or modernity, these movements present themselves not as radical but as custodians of care.
By foregrounding the concept of autoimmunity, this conference offers a framework for understanding how violence is justified through claims of protection, and how the grammar of care becomes a tool of exclusion. In doing so, the event aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on the political afterlives of fascism and the embodied dimensions of contemporary authoritarianism.
Participants and Contributors
The conference brings together scholars working on fascism, race, medicine, environmental politics, wellness cultures, and authoritarian governance across historical and contemporary contexts. The following list reflects potential participants and contributors currently under consideration. Participation has not yet been confirmed, and the list remains subject to revision.
Meet the Team
Emanuel Rota - Director
Havva Karakas Keles - Associate Director
Amanda Smith - Coordinator for Academic Programs
Suzana Palaska-Nicholson - Outreach Coordinator
Rajinie Alexandre - Office Support Specialist
Lea Karpov - Research Assistant, MA Student
Nathan Knoll - Research Assistant, MA Student
Updates and Contact
Additional information, including confirmed speakers, finalized dates, and registration details, will be posted on this page as they become available.
For inquiries or to express interest in the conference, please contact the organizing committee at:
rajiniea@illinois.edu for outreach, logistics, and transport-related questions
Event Co-sponsors
Center for Advanced Study (CAS)
Unit for Criticism and Interprative Theory
Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies