Colloquium: Silent Protest: The Emergence of a New Mode of Contentious Politics in Europe and the United States (c. 1880-1925)

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially presents its winter semester 2021/2022 colloquium.

​THEO JUNG, UNIVERSITY OF FREIBURG

Silent Protest: The Emergence of a New Mode of Contentious Politics in Europe and the United States (c. 1880-1925)​

Although individual cases of silent protest as a variation on established practices can be found throughout history, silence only really established itself as part of the repertoire of contentious politics around the turn of the 20th century. Why was this the case? And what does that tell us about the era's social and political transformations? After a preliminary consideration of the formal and functional variability of silent protest, we turn to a more detailed analysis of its role in three large protest movements (the workers' movement, the women's movement, and the Afro-American civil rights movement). On this basis, the presentation opens into a wider discussion of the specific symbolic, tactical and emotional logics of silent protest and the historical circumstances of its emergence.

Theo Jung studied history and philosophy in Leiden and Berlin. At the University of Bielefeld, he wrote a dissertation on the emergence of modern European discourses of cultural decadence during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which was published as a monograph in 2012. Since 2011, he has held the position of assistant at the Chair of Modern Western European History of Freiburg University. Jung's main research interests are in comparative Western European history, from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. He has published on various political practices and spaces, on historical semantics, the history of time, and on a variety of theoretical issues. In December 2021, Jung finalized his habilitation with a second book on the uses and understandings of silence in European politics during the long nineteenth century.

Webex-Link

Meeting number: 2741 291 7464

Meeting password: xGAbpPeP353