Wednesday, April 5 2017, 4:30pm MLC Room 147 Lecture Dr. Sarah Colvin, the Schroeder Professor of German at Cambridge, will be coming to Athens to give a talk about right-wing radicalization in Germany: “Radicalization” is a tricky notion: the idea of the “radical” has come to signal mainstream society’s Other. I’ll present some narrative evidence that people who have “radical” beliefs often also share conventional or mainstream beliefs, and consider the implications of that. One hypothesis of this paper that there are strong reasons to listen to accounts that reject the dominant ideology, most particularly when it would be more comfortable to dismiss them as crazy. My case studies are young men who were involved in far-right-wing violence in Germany in the 1990s, and I draw on narrative theories across disciplines, including the emerging field of narrative criminology, to unsettle notions of the absolute difference of cultural from counter-cultural constructs. Dr. Sarah Colvin Department of German and Dutch Cambridge
