2021 Virtual Conference
Thank you to all participants, moderators, and organizers who helped make the 2021 conference a success.
You can find information about the conference theme, the conference program, and recordings of select panels from the conference, below.
2021 Union for Democratic Communications (UDC) 40th Anniversary Conference, June 23-25
Conference Theme: “Masking the Crisis: Social Movements, Street Politics, and the Political Process”
While masking has long been a contested practice renewed most recently around the articulation and concealment of the political identities of those employing confrontational tactics, the rise of the post-9/11 security state relegated masks to the realm of blockbuster superheroes and bandits. In 2020, however, the mask returned as a potent signifier of global struggle. In the U.S. context, after four years of movement building and popular discourse opposing the spectre of neofascism, the last year of the Trump administration saw explosions of street-level social protest around structural racism and police violence amidst a global pandemic, culminating in a white supremacist insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris offers both the promise and threat of a neoliberal restoration.
At this conference we discuss the politics of “masking” and “unmasking” in relation to our broader political, economic, and media crises. The fracturing of the Liberal project--exhausted by the contradictions and failures of neoliberalism--has unmasked our dire political straits, as denial becomes dogma and science is rejected in favor of bravado. While the past years have seen an inspiring rise in social movements, we risk being “masked” by the Biden effect, placated as part of a larger “progressive” bloc while the crises that brought us to the brink of authoritarianism continue to manifest.