Third Conference on the Cultural Battle: Facing Adversity

📅October 30 and November 27 | Hybrid format | Buenos Aires, Argentina
⏱14.00 to 21.00 (ARG)
📍Gino Germani Research Institute. Uriburu 950, 6th. Floor

In a political landscape marked by the rise of the right, the ways in which power is exercised and the conditions of political and cultural struggle are undergoing profound transformations. The so-called culture war has become a central dimension of the strategies of the new right, which contests meanings, sensibilities, and identities while simultaneously transforming institutions, technologies, and forms of intervention in society, as well as forms of political subjectivation and agency. But what does it mean to think and act in the face of adversity today? What conceptual tools, infrastructures, and practices do we need to understand and engage with this new scenario? For the third consecutive year, the Conference on the Culture War proposes to address these questions through an exploration that connects different dimensions of contemporary transformations. We begin with the struggle for hegemony and the uses that the new right makes of concepts from Marxist theorists, emancipatory projects, and their forms of political imagination. We then examine the accelerated development of new technological infrastructures applied to control, the expansion of intelligence systems, the cultural impact of AI, and a new capacity for surveillance applied to knowledge production and the extraction of data from populations. This exploration also leads us to investigate contemporary forms of control, the construction of the enemy, and the reinterpretation of terrorism and political violence. Finally, we ask what happens to the repertoires of action and tactics of resistance and dissent when traditional forms of confrontation seem to lose effectiveness and speaking out publicly exposes one to persecution and criminalization. Rather than offering definitive answers, the conference seeks to bring together research, experiences, and tools from diverse fields—academics, art, communication, activism, social organizations, and technological production—to consider the relationships between power, culture, technology, and conflict that are being shaped in the present. If the right wing has managed to contest and redefine languages, occupy infrastructures, produce new forms of subjectivity and redefine the figures of the threatening, the question cannot be limited to how to resist them: it also demands imagining what other forms of knowledge, sovereignty, organization, care and confrontation we can build.

Table 1: From Gramsci to Laje (From 5:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.)
Participate
Pilar Calveiro (political scientist BUAP)
Hernán Ouviña (activist and CONICET researcher)
Natalia Romé (Communication Sciences and CONICET researcher)
Ezequiel Saferstein (sociologist and CONICET researcher)
coordinate
Marilé Di Fillipo, Micaela Suárez and Ana Longoni

Round table 2: Who knows us? Intelligence, AI, and new power infrastructures (From 5:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.)
Participate
Valeria Suárez (communicator, teacher and researcher at UNLa)
Isha Kim (multimedia artist, psychologist, teacher and researcher)
Pablo Vannini (sociologist and professor at UNPAZ, partner in the free software cooperative gcoop)
coordinate
Julia Risler, Maximiliano de la Puente and Nicolás Cuello

Organized by
Group Art, Culture and Politics in Recent Argentina (IIGG-FSOC-UBA)
GT CLACSO Collective memories and resistance practices

They adhere
UBACYT Group “The eighties in communication and culture: transition, reception and institutionalization processes” (FSOC-UBA)
Regional Studies Center "Professor Felix Weinberg", Department of Humanities, National University of the South (UNS)
Group “Feminist and Decolonial Aesthetic and Critical Materials of the South. Aesthetics and Politics” (UNC)

Organizing Committee
Ana Cacopardo, Ana Guglielmucci, Ana Longoni, Ana Vidal, Cecilia Iida, Cora Gamarnik, Evangelina Margiolakis, Julia Risler, Laura Schenquer, Marilé Di Filippo, María Angélica Vega, Mauro Greco, Maximiliano de La Puente, Micaela Suárez, Nicolás Cuello, Ramiro Manduca, Verónica Perera.

The activity is hybrid, so you can request the Zoom link by emailing [email protected]

Program