Mestrando
em História e Culturas Políticas - PPGH/UFMG, Brazil
My
fellow medievalists, memedievalists, enthusiasts and classics scholars alike, last
week something deplorable happened here in Brazil, a small group of people
entered an online lecture and immediately started shouting things like, “you
are all bums,” “praise Bolsonaro” amongst more offensive terms - and one of
these invaders started to broadcast a pornographic website on the live feed -
which led the organization of the event to end the call.
That in
itself would already be something completely absurd, but as if it wasn’t enough
it is important to emphasize during which of our meetings this happened. This
was not the first and certainly will not be the last virtual presentation
organized by Vivarium - Laboratory for the Study of
Antiquity and the Mediaeval, or by other groups of classical or medieval studies, but it is
extremely symptomatic that the attacks occurred precisely at the round table
entered around themes on Africa and Asia. Furthermore, it is worth noting that
similar attacks have recently been occurring in lectures and meetings by
Africanist researchers. Therefore, these attacks are not just bad jokes or based
on a general hatred against public universities and academic research. They are
deliberate racist attacks with specific targets.
For a
long time we stood apathetic to what happened outside of our research objects
(which have the privilege or curse of being very distanced from us temporally
and sometimes geographically), and now we are scared and surprised by problems
that our colleagues from other areas are well used to experiencing. The
consequences of this indifference are knocking on our door now, and making a
blatant statement of the importance of effectively creating ways of acting
outside the traditional academic scope and the simple debate among peers. In
times of fake news and Templar Knights asking for military coup d’etats, the
popularization of scientific knowledge and the establishment of dialogue with a
real audience has never been more important. We are experiencing a real war for
the media and the spaces of speech outside our “little academic cabales”, a war
that we continue to lose due to apathy or lack of mastery of these media. It is
in this context that initiatives like the Public
Medievalist or the
Brazilian website Café História, and specially of
content creator and fellow colleague Lívia Teodoro, are even more important
and should be a true source of inspiration.
Disapproval
notes like this one, or the one you just read, are still very
important for the visibility of what happened, but it is pivotal that we take
more concrete measures, and soon.
