 Hi everyone, for the first time here at Kojitati Press, let's talk about media and communication. We wonder today about the role of nostalgia in right-wing populist communication. Do people agree more with populist statements if they contain nostalgic rhetoric? Are there any risks with using nostalgia in political communication? To answer these questions, we invited Manuel Menke from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who will explore nostalgia in the party Alternative for Germany, the AFD, online election campaign in 2019. I'm Rodrig Silva, let's talk about media and communication. Hi Manuel, welcome to our episode. Hello. My first question for you would be, why is this topic important? Well, we saw that populism in recent decades unfortunately has become quite successful in many different countries. And Germany is no exception of that. And for a long time it looked like Germany has a protective layer because of our past towards these usually right-wing populist parties. But in recent years the AFD has become one of successful parties in the party system, has established itself. And we wanted to understand how they use the past now to push their gender, to push their policies, and to be actually successful in the German party system with voters with actually quite successful numbers in votes and thereby understand better how populists are using the past. Of course here in the German context but also beyond. Of course, and you have studied this topic before and when you started this research in particular of your article, what were you hoping to find? So what was the research gap there? Yeah, we approached it in two ways. We tried with a more qualitative approach to look at how they are using the past in Facebook communication, on their website or in the post of their party leaders. And we also looked at which kind of statements do work particularly well when they use nostalgia with the voters. And we found that there are two different types of nostalgia that the AFD was using. One was that they try to get people's interest and emotions right up around the question of the 1989 peaceful revolution because it was a time in which East Germans felt like they have an opportunity in the future like they after they were able to overthrow the regime had possibilities in front of them. And unfortunately, many of those hopes did not unfold the way they were told to and promised to. And the AFD used this frustration among people to say, okay, we can recreate this moment, this moment of potential now again, because the Western elites in Germany are still trying to, are still not helping the East German people and population in the way they deserve it. And telling them, of course, that the AFD will be the party to bring this bright future now and people who go to the ballot box now will create this moment of glory basically. And the other one was that with right-wing populist parties, we know that they try to create this idea of the heartland, meaning that people try to find a collective identity with looking back into the past and seeing their privileges they had in the past. And of course, what connects them as the native people of a country and the AFD is promising to bring that back to have a society that is not changing as much as it does right now, that goes back to family values and traditions, that goes back to having more homogeneous society in which things like the change of the workplaces and the change in how society is put together and how multinational or multi-ethnic it is will be turned back basically and the position of these people is reinstated in society. So these two promises are made and the nostalgia that is connected to it and the emotional layer this brings is very powerful and is used by the AFD. Of course, a promising context for the conversation we're having. So about what you told us now this context, can you tell us how these findings can impact somehow in terms of public policies, in terms of individual choice, even political policy? So how do the findings translate into real-life situations? Yeah, we learn of course a lot about how people are feeling in our today's world. When you see how people are nostalgic and what they are nostalgic about, we understand why our society and the way it is changing causes people to feel anxiety and which elements they maybe hope to return to what they think is going wrong and changing maybe too rapidly and into the wrong directions. And this allows us basically to see nostalgia as an early warning system when we see what people are suddenly longing for that we understand maybe they are struggling with the changes they are confronted these days and we should be aware of this relationship and should understand that certain types of changes need a lot of communication and need a lot of sometimes backtracking or bringing people along so that they don't feel like they are forgotten or lost and that they don't have the sense that going back would be better than moving forward. Of course, we have touched upon your research and the so what element of your research. So now let's focus on the now what. So can you indicate to the researchers out there what comes next in this topic? Perhaps more qualitative studies like you did or some other geographies or parties. So what now? Yeah, I would say the whole feel around the relationship between politics and memory is very interesting and has not been researched in the depth that it can be. So there's a lot of potential there to follow this route. And there's, as you said, the question of geography. So where do we find these kinds of populists uses of the past and what type of histories and memories are they connected to? Because we have to understand that while the mechanisms are more or less the same, we never know which type of type of histories and memories are used and and modified, you could say, in the strategies of populists. So there is a lot to learn about the role and relationship between the individual paths of a country and how populists are making use of it. The other approach, of course, is the question how does it work with the users or the voters who get in contact with this kind of content? How do they react to nostalgic rhetoric? Is it working better with certain groups in society? Is it related to age, for example? So there are a lot of questions still open around these these issues of the effectiveness of populist communication that uses the past in these ways. Absolutely. So still a lot to explore in this topic. Can you provide some additional resources about the topic that was discussed today? Some other materials for those listening to us can explore the topic. Yeah. The research on nostalgia has quite a long tradition, but it basically has been discovered for media and communication researchers lately. And so when we look at a little bit older literature, there's Fred Davis' work on yearning for yesterday. A sociology of nostalgia is the book called and it is the first one that connected the idea of nostalgia with mass media, which is an important relationship that also plays a big role, of course, when we look at nostalgia in the media and populist uses of it in mediated form. Then there's Svetlana Boehm's work, also a book that is working with the foundations, you could say, of nostalgia. She was the first one who stated bluntly that the connection or the relationship between nostalgia and populism can be quite explosive and introduced in a very interesting typology there. Then there's Katarina Niemeyer's volume, which is called Media and Nostalgia, where you can find many different chapters on how nostalgia and media are related, not so much about populism, but still I think a lot of interesting chapters to find there. And the South Ham nostalgia group is one to mention a group of psychology researchers in the UK who published, I don't know, how many articles by now with great research on the psychological dimension of nostalgia and media more and more. And maybe a little bit of advertising for my own work. We just recently published a special issue in the International Journal of Communication on digital memory and populism, where we widen a little bit the perspective from nostalgia to memory in general and especially in the digital context. So these are very, I think, interesting elements to look at in the field. And if you are more interested in more network-related aspects, there's the International Media and Nostalgia Network. I'm a co-founder of and you can find many different researchers from a very interdisciplinary field if you are interested in joining this group and this type of research. Plenty of materials out there to explore politics and memory. Manuel, let's go to the punchline of this talk. If there is anything you want our audience to remember about this talk, so the punchline, what would it be? I would say nostalgia is a very complex phenomenon and it has so many interesting dimensions to it that I wouldn't want people to take away that it is this one-dimensional negative element we are only having with nostalgia. It is, of course, a dangerous element when we look at populism, but it can also be a very creative and positive thing, which we all know, we all are sometimes nostalgic and really feel how this emotion is a great way to remember and to reminiscence in the past and it can inspire us. It can make us very creative in how we approach the future as well. So see nostalgia in this broad variety of elements it brings and of ways to approach it and not only as this very negative, unfortunately very negative role it plays currently in many of these populist movements. Thank you, Manuel, for being with us today. Thank you so much. This podcast is powered by Kojitatu Press. 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