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 and roundtable discussions
- Timing Day 1: 9:30 - 5:30 Day 2: 9:30 - 3:45
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.
Meet the Team
Emanuel Rota - Director
Havva Karakas Keles - Associate Director; Director of Graduate Studies
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
Contact
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)
Center for Global Studies (CGS)
Schedule
Day 1 Аgenda
Day Two Agenda
About Our Panels and Contributors
Panel 1: Autoimmunity, Care, and Exclusion
Catherine Clune-Taylor is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her work in feminist science and technology studies examines how science, medicine, technology, and institutions shape the conditions of life, death, care, and exclusion, especially for marginalized groups.
Talk title: The Dissipating Immunity of Whiteness: The January 6th Insurrection as an Autoimmune Reaction
Shelley Tremain is a philosopher of disability whose work brings together feminist philosophy, Foucault, bioethics, ableism, and biopolitics. She is the author of Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability and editor of Foucault and the Government of Disability.
Talk title: Target Practice/Being Philosophy’s Bull’s Eye/Bioethics as Eugenic Mechanism
Sibel Arikoglu is a Linguistics PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and teaches LING 250 (Linguistic Diversity in the US) as the instructor of record. She works on migration, identity construction, gender, and digital discourse. She also examines Turkish German migration and bilingualism in Germany.
Panel 2: Race, Persecution, and Social Policy
Valeria Galimi is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Florence. Her research focuses on twentieth-century France, European antisemitism, fascism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust, with particular attention to political violence and “street antisemitism.”
Talk title: “From Race to the Social Body: Community, Protection, and Metapolitics in the Italian New Right”.
Paul Weindling is Research Professor in the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes University. His work examines eugenics, social welfare, Nazi medical crimes, coerced research, victims of medical experimentation, and the history of international health.
Talk Title: The Body in Extremis: Coerced Experiments and their Victims in the Nazi Autoimmune State
Kevin Crandall is a graduate student in Philosophy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His work is connected to philosophy and public writing, including contributions to music and cultural criticism.
Panel 3: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Ordering of Populations
Roberta Pergher is a historian of modern Europe at Indiana University, specializing in Fascist Italy, Italian colonialism, sovereignty, citizenship, and borderlands. She is the author of Mussolini’s Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy’s Borderlands, 1922–1943.
Talk title: An Imperial Disorder? Sovereignty, Borders, and People in Fascist Italy
Tamir Bar-On is Professor-Researcher in the School of Social Sciences and Government at Tecnológico de Monterrey. His work focuses on the radical right, the French New Right, neo-fascism, political ideologies, terrorism, and transnational right-wing thought.
Talk title: From ‘Freedom Convoy’ to First Use of Canada’s Emergencies Act: Two Related Conceptual Tools
Nathan Howard is a doctoral student in Philosophy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His areas include social and political philosophy, queer feminism, philosophy of gender, race, and sexuality, socialism and Marxism, and theories of love and cruelty.
Emanuel Rota / Noah Eber-Schmid Session
Emanuel Rota is a Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Director of the European Union Center. His research focuses on fascism, European intellectual history, political ideologies, colonialism, biopolitics, and the history of European identity.
Talk title: Revilo P. Oliver, Immunity, and the Biopolitical Route to Fascism
Noah Eber-Schmid is Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University Bloomington. His research focuses on American political thought, democratic theory, modern political thought, political extremism, and the contested boundaries of democratic practice
Talk title: The Contagion of Extremism: Political Fear, Antidemocratic Anxieties, and the Contagion of American Jacobinism.”
Panel 4: Nature, Purity, and the Healthy Body
Peter Staudenmaier is Associate Professor of History at Marquette University. His research focuses on twentieth-century Europe, especially Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, environmental history, racial thought, ecological movements, alternative agriculture, and the history of ecofascism.
Talk title: Natural Lifestyles and Authoritarian Politics: From the Life Reform Movement to Make America Healthy Again
Catherine Tebaldi is a researcher whose work examines far-right digital culture, wellness politics, “Granola Nazi” subcultures, gender, traditionalism, and the normalization of far-right ideas through lifestyle and nature-based discourse.
Talk Title: Making Natural Beauty
Lea Karpov is a graduate student in the MA in European Union Studies program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She has a background in political science and legal studies and works with the European Union Center and International and Area Studies Library.
Panel 5: Brazil, Morality, and the Transnational Far Right
Benjamin A. Cowan is Professor of History at the University of California San Diego. His work examines Brazil, the transnational right, Cold War authoritarianism, morality politics, sexuality, religion, anticommunism, and the making of conservative and religious-right networks across the Americas.
Talk title: Mortifications of the Flesh: Fascism and the Masculine Body on Brazil’s Far Right.
Alexandre Gonçalves is an Assistant Professor in the College of Media at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research examines media, communication, digital politics, and the role of social media in the rise of Brazil’s New Right.
Talk title: The Metaphysical Crusade of Brazil's New Right
Deiver De Melo —Deiver De Melo will chair the panel “Brazil, Morality, and the Transnational Far Right.”
Concluding Roundtable
Verena Erlenbusch Anderson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. A critical theorist, she works at the intersection of political theory, contemporary European philosophy, history, and terrorism/conflict studies.
Peter Fritzsche is a historian of modern Germany and Europe at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His work has explored Nazism, memory, everyday life, catastrophe, and the ways ordinary people understood and experienced historical rupture.
Brett Ashley Kaplan is Professor of Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. Her work focuses on Holocaust representation, memory studies, Jewish literature, race, art, and literature.
Jessica Greenberg is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. A political and legal anthropologist, she works on democracy, law, human rights, social movements, revolution, postsocialism, and Europe, especially the Balkans