Affective Infrastructures and Everyday Normalisation: Cultural and Emotional Mechanisms of Far-Right Legitimation

Abstract

This panel explores the cultural, emotional, and micropolitical processes through which far-right ideas, practices, and actors achieve legitimacy and become embedded in everyday life. Moving beyond institutional analyses of far-right success, papers foreground the affective atmospheres, performative practices, banal narratives, and emotional dynamics that normalise exclusionary politics and shape both individual experiences and collective mobilisation. The panel brings together research on a variety of nations - including Sweden, Germany, and India - employing diverse methodological approaches to reveal the multifaceted mechanisms of far-right normalisation. Collectively, papers in this panel demonstrate that far-right normalisation cannot be understood solely through electoral outcomes or ideological shifts in party manifestos. Through attention to emotions, performances, spatial tactics, everyday narratives, and stigma management, the panel reveals how far-right politics becomes culturally embedded, affectively resonant, and experientially naturalised. The papers theorise concepts including political stigma, emotional climates, heartland imaginaries, performative infrastructures, and micropolitics to illuminate the subtle, routine, and often banal processes through which exclusionary orders of belonging are reproduced.

Title	Details
Stigma Management Among Tertiary-Educated Far-Right Supporters	View Paper Details
From Fear to Radicalization: Emotional Dynamics of Extremism	View Paper Details
The Micropolitics of Far-Right Normalisation: Everyday Narratives of Achievement in Germany	View Paper Details
Staging Hate: The Political Mobilization of Hindutva Processions in India	View Paper Details