Despite the burgeoning literature on populism, little attention has been paid to the relationship between this phenomenon and the spatiality of politics. This workshop aims to analyse how populist parties construct “the people” through places and spaces and how they operate through local, national and transnational scales.
Undeniably, a variegated array of scientific fields, such as nationalism studies and political geography, have developed established trajectories in the study of the interaction between space and collective identities and action. Moreover, populism studies have recently started paying attention to the role of ‘places’ and spatial imaginaries in populist discourse, as well as in populist support (e.g. Albertazzi and Zulianello, 2021; Cramer, 2016; Fitzgerald, 2018; Pixová, 2020; Ziblatt et al., 2020). The growing interest for the geographical variable has furthermore resulted in a ‘localist turn’ in populist studies (Chou et al. 2021) as well as more attention to transnational populism (e.g. De Cleen, Moffitt, Panayotu and Stavrakakis 2020, Agustín 2020, Prentoulis 2021).
However, despite these works, this field of research has not yet fully assessed the spatial and geographical divides within its object of study, and we lack theoretical and empirical understanding of both how populist projects conceptualize space but also how specific spatialities and geographical imaginations shape populist projects . Especially on the supply-side, there is still the need for scientific understanding of how populist parties and movement produce, interact with, and connect to spaces. How do they frame spatial scales – i.e. local, national, transnational spaces? How is space constructed within populism’s discourse, practices, and strategy? How does populism produce and signify the nation vs. the transnational, the countryside vs. the urban, and the North vs. the South? How do left- and right-wing forms of populism appeal to the geographical space? Through what kind of discourse and communication channels does populism invoke the role of space?
This workshop addresses these questions and aims to enhance our understanding of the spatiality of populist politics, also contributing to the scientific analysis of related phenomena such as nationalism, sovereigntism, localism, transnationalism and, more broadly, territorial politics.
