Negotiating the Revolt: Punk in Times of Political Transformation

Name: Negotiating the Revolt: Punk in Times of Political Transformation
Start: 2025-05-16T10:00:00+02:00
End: 2025-05-18T20:00:00+02:00
Location: Eternia Smichov

Schedule

Fri May 16 2025 at 10:00 am to Sun May 18 2025 at 08:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Eternia Smichov | Prague, PR

The conference is organized by the Institute of Czech History at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University alongside the project Negotiating the Revolt in Czech and Slovak Postsocialist Transition, which is supported by the Czech Science Foundation and carried out in
collaboration with the Archive of Czech and Slovak Subcultures, the Centre for the Study of Popular Culture and the Punk Scholars Network Slovak and Czech.
Date: May 16 – 18, 2025
Venue: Eternia, Nádražní 3, Prague 5, Czech Republic: https://www.eterniasmichov.com/
Email contact: [email protected]
Conference organizers: Karolina Válová, Miroslav Michela, Ondřej Daniel, Marta Harasimowicz
Conference fee for 3 days of the conference: 500 CZK / 20 EUR (covers coffee breaks and snacks during the conference; lunch, dinner and entry to the gig are not included)
Entrance fee for visitors per day: 50 CZK / 2 EUR
Additional program:
• excursion to the Archive of Czech and Slovak Subcultures
• punk gig
• film presentation and discussion on making of the DIY documentary Garáže (Garage) on a significant site of the punk scene in Bratislava (SK)
• exhibition of early 1990s punk and hardcore posters in the Czech Republic and Slovakia
• roundtable discussion on punk and transition
Thematically, we seek to cover the meanings and actions connected to “punk” on five levels:
a) Punk as discourse practice: performances, locations, texts and clubs. How did different punk actors (individual and collective) present themselves and argue their liminal position towards the mainstream culture and other communities of style?
b) Punk as mainstream: music charts and labels, propagation and TV appearance. How did punk manage to enter the wider pool of mainstream popular culture practices at the turn of the 1990s?
c) Punk and politics: activism and expert approaches, which are also connected to new social movements (vegetarianism/veganism, animal and human rights, anti-capitalism, anti-racism,
racism and nationalism, neo-Nazism, ecology, feminism etc.). How were these activist agendas received in the subcultural milieu? How was the approach towards politics negotiated?
d) Punk as a personal issue: individual revolt, hybridity, lifestyle issues and autonomy. Despite understanding the “personal as political”, certain practices have pointed more to the individual than a collective practice. How did the psychology of different actors relate to their “punk revolt”? How did the “punk revolt” relate to different ecstatic practices and aims to achieve personal autonomy?
e) Punk as retro: Long durée reflection, ageing, remembrance, disenchantment, disillusionment, nostalgia, idealising the 1980s and 1990s. How is the “punk revolt” evaluated ex-post? How are punk actors using their punk histories to achieve legitimacy and subcultural capital?