Published on 29.09.2025

Conference by Prof. Leerom Medovoi, 27.10.2025, 10-12, MIS02.2120

Announcement: Professor Leerom Medovoi

On October 27, the English departments of the Universities of Fribourg and Bern will jointly host Professor Leerom Medovoi. He will deliver two lectures drawn from his new book project on right-wing authoritarianism and climate disavowal. The lectures are intended for students but are open to the public. No registration is required.

Professor Medovoi teaches American literature at the University of Arizona. His most recent monograph is The Inner Life of Race: Bodies, Souls and the History of Racial Power (Duke University Press, 2024). In the Fall term of 2025, he will be a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest.

Further details about the two lectures can be found below.

Climate Change, Fetishism, and the Far-Right Politics of Racial Threat

University of Fribourg, 10-12, MIS 02-2120

How is climate change connected to the racial politics of populist far right movements? I will suggest that we find an unlikely answer in theories of fetishism. For Freud, the fetish was a psychological defense mechanism that protects us from painful realities. For Marx, the fetishism of commodities refers to the shiny power and allure of money, which blocks our view of actual social relations. Human beings can also become fetish objects. If we associate a group with certain dangerous “magical” properties, or if we confuse that group with the damage that money has caused, we may feel better protected from the uncertain changes that are approaching us as global warming increases.

I will argue that far-right politics today reduces people’s sense of powerlessness in a peculiar way. It converts their paralyzing climate anxieties into potent indignation about a racial threat that paradoxically represents a secret symbol for the unsettling dangers of a changing planet. Today’s far right offers a strangely displaced response to growing ecological harm, but one that only intensifies the problem.

What is Climate Change Denial Anyway?

University of Bern, 14-16, A-119 UniS

It at first seem obvious what climate change denial is: a simple refutation of the fact that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet. But this narrow definition is insufficient to answer many important questions. For example, does climate change denial mean that people refuse the truth because they don’t care? Or do they refuse the truth because they care too much? What exactly does denial involve at a psychological level? Does it mean not feeling the emotions that the truth about climate might stir up? Or might it instead redirect those emotions toward a different subject? To answer these questions, we need a critical approach that can explore how cultural and psychic ambivalence actually works.

This talk will show that our understanding of climate change denial has changed quite a bit over the last twenty years, partly in response to the changing political situation. It will also argue that, given where we are today, we would be better off referring to this important phenomenon as “climate disavowal.” As I will show, the term “disavowal” moves us closer to the critical approach we need: it captures the split self and the divided emotional life of the person who would deny the existence of climate change.