Collective Reflections: MEMPOP at the HEPP (Emotions, Populism and Polarised Politics, Media, and Culture) conference in Helsinki, 18-20 May 2026
This year MEMPOP went to Helsinki to attend the sixth HEPP conference, which, since 2019, has been providing an interdisciplinary space to explore themes related to populist mobilisation, polarisation, and the dynamics of emotional engagement in various political and mediatised contexts. This year, the conference’s programme was packed with thought-provoking panels and keynotes engaging with discussions on grievance politics, democratic resilience, political communication, misinformation, nationalism, memory politics, and the role of emotions in shaping contemporary political participation and conflict. The conference also highlighted emerging methodological approaches, including computational social science and AI-driven analysis, offering valuable perspectives on how polarisation and populist narratives evolve across digital and mediated environments.
MEMPOP contributed to the conference by bringing a “from below” perspective to the study of populism, grounded in ethnographic research and attentive to everyday practices, affective experiences, and local narratives. The panel organized by the team, titled “Memory and Populism from Below: Affective Politics, Everyday Narratives, and Grassroots Mobilization”, showcased findings emerging from the project’s different field sites and explored how memory, belonging, and political emotions intersect in diverse social and political contexts.
Despite being scheduled as the final panel of the last conference day, the session was very well attended and generated an engaging discussion. The feedback received highlighted the value of ethnographic approaches in populism research, particularly their ability to capture nuances, ambiguities, and lived experiences that are often less visible in more traditional political science analyses. The discussion confirmed the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue in understanding contemporary populist dynamics and the emotional dimensions of political life.
Impressions from the team:
Diána found the panel The Language of Rights: Securitisation, Institutional Legitimacy and Discursive Recalibration particularly inspiring. Securitisation has been a running theme in her own research in Ukraine, where culture, language and memory have all been increasingly securitised in the context of the Donbas war, and then the full-scale invasion. Marcin Kosman’s paper on the migration discourse of the Civic Platform, and Radka Vicenova’s case study of the Slovak far right and its appropriation of key human rights vocabulary resonated especially. The papers all operated in international relations or political science frameworks, and it was useful to see how neighbouring disciplines theorise something she is still grappling with as ethnographer.
Diána Vonnák presenting Mnemonic Populism and the rhetoric of Nation Building in Western Ukraine
The panel Disputed Green Futures: Socio-Political Backlashes Across Scales was particularly helpful for Franz. It brought together case studies of “green development” from Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, the UK, and Lithuania. Aijan Sharshenova showed how President Sadyr Japarov’s administration has intensified the exploitation of natural resources while simultaneously emphasizing environmental concerns. Anete Ušča analysed contestations around wind farms in Saldus, where local grievances intersect with populist narratives of territorial identity, distrust of elites, democratic exclusion, and socio-economic injustice. Scott Rodgers examined discussions of London’s sustainable transport policies on Reddit, showing how technical and social infrastructures mediate pace-based environmental backlashes. Siarhei Liubimau conceptualised resistance to “green” urban mobility during the Vilnius mayoral elections as “motorised citizenship,” in which populist subjectivity is tied to fossil-fuel regimes. The engaging discussion between panellists and the audience pointed to the need to move across Hoschshild’s “empathy wall” and take seriously the emotional, socio-economic, and infrastructural logics through which green transitions become contested.
Franz Graf presenting Negotiating Water and Memory: Populism and Affective Belonging in Burgenland
Laura found the panel Left Populisms in Praxis very insightful. Given that contemporary discussions of populism are often dominated by right-wing cases, it was particularly interesting to engage with scholarship focused on left-wing populism and its distinctive dynamics. The panel offered nuanced perspectives on how left populist projects operate both in opposition and in power, especially through Laclauian frameworks. Laura also found Samuele Mazzolini’s discussion of the Latin American Pink Tide especially engaging, particularly his focus on the tension between populism as rupture and the question of institutional legacies once populist movements are in power. More broadly, the panel was valuable in showing how questions of verticality, clientelism, affect, and political attachments shape populist politics, and in offering conceptual tools for anthropological and ethnographic analysis.
Laura Mafizzoli and Astrea Nikolovska (online) presenting Seams of Ambivalence: Populism from Below in Serbia and Georgia
Astrea found the conference especially valuable for the range of approaches scholars brought to studying populism. Participating online, she was struck by how strongly political science and political communication perspectives shape thinking about populism, which made it both interesting and challenging to think through how anthropological and ethnographic approaches to populism can enter into dialogue with neighboring disciplines. The discussion following the MEMPOP panel was particularly encouraging in this regard. The engagement with the project’s “from below” approach showed that attention to everyday practices, ambivalence, affect, and local narratives can open productive conversations across disciplinary boundaries. For Astrea, the panel confirmed the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue for understanding populism not only as a political strategy or discourse, but also as something lived, interpreted, and negotiated in everyday social worlds.
Ioana Brunet presenting Tourism, Memory Politics and Populism in Bukovina – Ambiguity and Continuities
For Ioana, still in the middle of fieldwork, a conference like HEPP6 offered the chance to test half-formed ideas against a diverse range of interlocutors, to see where they hold and where they need more work. It was also a good opportunity to step back from the immediacy of everyday fieldwork and think about where the Bukovina case sits within wider comparative conversations about memory politics and populist mobilisation in Europe. The panel “Symbolic and Narrative Constructions of Space, Nation, and Identity” was the one that particularly got her attention; Graziela Ares’s reading of Budapest’s Kossuth Square through Baudrillard’s framework of ‘simulacra’ offered a thought-provoking account of how built space and national symbolism are recruited for populist political ends, while Ilana Hartikainen presented her upcoming project developing a mnemonic and semiotic approach to democracy, arguing that liberal democracy is better understood as a historically embedded memory culture than as a set of formal institutions – and exploring what this means for how we analyse the populist pressures it faces.
