Join us on April 28 for a discussion with Dr. Katy Brown about her work on the political mainstream, its character, and its role in mainstreaming the far right electorally and ideologically.

While people often use and hear the term "mainstream" in a range of settings, there has been relatively little discussion about what it actually means. Within far-right studies, attempts to define the mainstream have been centered around party politics, where scholars have sought to understand the impact of mainstream party strategies on far-right successes. While offering a useful starting point, this focus on electoral politics has led to more rigid conceptions of the mainstream which encourage particular normative assumptions about its identity.

Katy Brown proposes a definition for the mainstream that accounts for its contingency and construction, and in so doing, challenges dominant narratives about its nature. These issues are crucial when we consider the relationship between the mainstream and far right because they encourage us to question its perceived positioning as a bulwark against reactionary politics. By introducing the concepts of talking "with" and "about" the far right, we are encouraged to take the role of the mainstream in far-right mainstreaming seriously and to pursue counter-hegemonic alternatives.

Katy Brown (she/her) is a Research Fellow in Language and Social Justice at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research focuses on the mainstreaming of the far right, principally the role that mainstream actors from politics and media play in normalizing far-right discourse. She completed her PhD on far-right mainstreaming during the Brexit referendum at the University of Bath, before securing an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship at Maynooth University. She has published articles and chapters on the topics of mainstreaming, far-right discourse, populism, methodology, and research ethics, and is currently working on her first monograph on mainstreaming.

Aaron Irion is an Institute Associate at the Illiberalism Studies Program, housed in the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University. His work has focused on the political economy of populist, illiberal, and radical parties and, more recently, on the historical and philosophical entanglements of liberalism and its ostensible opposites.