This conference is organized within the framework of the FWF Elise Richter project Reckoning with Dictatorship: History, Memory, and Justice in the Czech Republic after 1989. The historical methodology developed to analyze authoritarian regimes indeed provides valuable analytical tools for examining the biopolitics of governance during the recent Covid crisis. Practices of surveillance and self-surveillance, censorship and self-censorship, the construction of legitimacy under conditions of fear, bottom-up patterns of compliance, adaptation, and dissent, the subordination of judicial oversight to executive authority, and the role of intellectual elites and mainstream media in legitimizing state narratives: all help illuminate how the Covid response linked the imperative of care with new forms of social and political control. The conference will thus reflect on the difficulty of balancing the protection of public health with the preservation of pluralism and civil liberties.
Toby Green, historian of Africa and inequality at King’s College London, will deliver the opening keynote.
PROGRAMM
Registration Care, Control, and Biopolitics
University of Graz, 28-30 April 2026
RESOWI building, Section G, Room SZ 15.22