Cultural Studies in a Time of Culture Wars

Wilsey, Grace; Wilsey, Grace

Since social media’s inception, conservative agitators have continuously waged war against perceived inclusive values in American consumer culture from controversies over Starbuck’s holiday cups deemed “not Christmas-y enough” to the right-wing boycott of Disney’s Frozen for its divergence from male-savior narrative conventions. As part of what white supremacist Christian nationalists deem a “culture war” against progressive “wokeness,” these agitators have normalized far-right rhetoric online through organized trolling campaigns and the creation of propaganda. Across its scholarly heritage from the Frankfurt School to Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, cultural studies functions in opposition to fascist agendas in its revelation of systems of inequality and injustice as revealed through media. This session takes a cross-disciplinary approach towards identifying the role of cultural studies in countering the rising tide of fascist discourse online today.

In today’s media landscape, the fact that fascist rhetoric circulates online, mainstreaming ideas that are hateful and intentionally divisive, is undeniable. Our panel interrogates what we gain by critically engaging with and analyzing rage-bait texts that are post-critical, propagandistic, predatory, or all of the above. Bringing together scholars from German studies, classical reception studies, film and media, and literary studies, we ask, what is the role of cultural studies in and outside of the academy today? How do we instrumentalize our frameworks from the Frankfurt School, Birmingham School, and French post-structuralism for the current moment, and do they still hold weight? In asking these questions about the role of cultural studies in critiquing digital discourse, we draw upon current scholarship in the field, including Curtis Dozier’s on white-nationalist engagements with Greco-Roman antiquity, Lisa Nakamura’s formulation of the racist glitch, Alex Stern’s work on conservative imaginary futures, and Damon R. Young on the politics of irony in Web 2.0.

Each presenter analyzes a contemporary media object that has engendered polarizing online discourse. Grace Wilsey theorizes the role of the whistleblower in understanding modern day systems of power within big tech through analysis of the film, The Social Reckoning, set to release in October 2026. Kehinde Sowunmi explores how rhetorics of mobilization, nation building and racial identity are constructed via “fun” storytelling in children’s edutainment, using PragerU Kids’s citizen-building agenda as her case study. Júlia Irion Martins interrogates how femininity and humor operate in the leftist-turned-right wing podcast Red Scare, tracing how contrarianism and paranoia operate as the primary ideology of the “terminally online” on both sides of the political spectrum. Amanda Kubic examines online reactions to the casting of Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s 2026 film adaptation of the Odyssey to explore how whitewashing political ideologies continue to inform popular discourses around classical reception projects today. These presentations will run between 10-12 minutes each and will seek to raise methodological questions on working in cultural studies leading to the question and answer portion of the session.

Viewing these texts and the online discourse surrounding them through the lens of cultural studies, we consider the role of academic criticism to address anti-critical currents of power circulating in contemporary popular culture. Together, the papers on this panel invite thinking about how—or if it is even possible—for academic and popular discourse to converse. In a moment when academic critique can feel insulated and futile against a rising tide of anti-intellectualism, we argue for the crucial importance of cultural studies research as a form of reflection and resistance.

362 Cultural Studies in a Time of Culture Wars: Calls for Papers