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Read "The New Age of Eliminationism in America: A Conversation with David Neiwert and Barry Mauer in Orlando, Florida, April 19, 2017" here.



On April 18, 2017, David Neiwert presented a talk to the University of Central Florida titled “The New Age of Eliminationism in America: How the Internet Feeds Radicalization and Dehumanization.” The next day, he sat down for a discussion with Dr. Barry Mauer, Interim Director of the Texts and Technology Doctoral Program and a co-director of the Citizen Curator Project, which is sponsoring exhibitions about Eliminationism and resilience on the anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub shooting.
Neiwert summarized his April 18th talk as follows: The politics of elimination — embodied in nativism, white supremacism, and similar authoritarian ideologies -have long been part of the American political fabric, but in recent years have come bubbling forward in the wave of hate-crime incidents associated with the 2016 election, as well as mass killings such as those in Charleston, S.C., and at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Historically fueled by dehumanizing rhetoric and belief systems, eliminationism has become a common theme in rising right-wing ideologies around the globe, spread especially through the phenomenon of online radicalization, both among Islamist radicals and alt-right white nationalists. Neiwert’s talk will explore this history, and suggest ways of countering the spread of this kind of hate.

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For more about the project, read "The Citizen Curating Project Confronts The Pulse Nightclub Shooting"  here The Citizen Curator Project, established in 2014 in Orlando, encourages ordinary citizens to try curating for themselves and to approach the task as a form of public policy consultation. Curating as activism requires that we assume the identity of uninvited consultants who have witnessed catastrophe, deliberated about it, and wish to share our epiphanies and policy recommendations with policy makers and other members of society. Because curating has been crucial to ideas of community in the modern era—for example, museums arose with nations and reflected national priorities—we want citizens to think of curating as another means of building and shaping community, a means of increasing their own agency within a more democratic and participatory process. The Citizen Curator Project invites participants from the area to create a series of exhibitions on various themes. I
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