Laureate Centre for History and Population, Morven Brown, lv.3, Room 353,
11 & 12 Dec 2025
This two-day academic workshop invites early career researchers to critically and creatively examine the concept of opposition from a historical perspective, with a focus on its political, aesthetic, and institutional dimensions. As authoritarian tendencies intensify across global contexts, the category of opposition—its meanings, mediations, and mobilisations—demands urgent reassessment. From the suppression of dissent to the strategic invocation of ‘the people’ as a homogenous body, contemporary regimes increasingly rely on discourses of division, co-optation, and corporatist unity to manage populations and forestall genuine contestation. Crucially, rising authoritarianism is bound up with the history and politics of population—from immigration and labour policy to land, energy, and food governance, as well as anti-trans legislation and the broader biopolitics of sex, gender, and sexuality. These state strategies not only regulate bodies and social life but also delimit the conditions under which opposition can be conceived, organised, or enacted. This event will consider how opposition has been defined, resisted, framed, and refigured in diverse historical conjunctures, and will ask what remains possible under the sign of resistance.
