23/07/2026
📣 Workshop “Confessions of Bad Taste: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Guilty Pleasures ”
Organization: Dr. Paul Buckermann (KWI), Morten Paul (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) & Roxanne Phillips (KWI)
Performances of shamelessness and mechanisms of shaming define our contemporary world. Yet not so long ago, confessions of supposedly shameful activities were accompanied by a sense of glee. Enjoying rom-coms, reality TV, or fast food was framed as a „guilty pleasure“ – and reflexively dismissed as trivial and self-explanatory. However, closer inspection reveals guilty pleasures to be a complex and contradictory discursive phenomenon. The workshop “Confessions of Bad Taste” sets out to investigate guilty pleasures as a specific speech act. What is at stake in the public performance of guilty pleasures? Where, exactly, does the desire to confess one’s own guilty pleasures come from? And why do we take such delight in doing this? (...)
Through interdisciplinary exchange, the workshop aims to explore the historically and culturally shifting relationships between consumption, status, value judgments, and affect that are articulated through performances of guilty pleasures. We welcome proposals from a diverse range of disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives. Submissions from media studies, social anthropology, global history, religious studies, linguistics, psychology, gender studies, ethnography, philosophy, economics, political science, and the digital humanities are encouraged.
Submit your ideas now!
Full Call: urlr.me/KD4JDP
🗓️ 2-4 June 2027
📍 KWI Essen
ℹ️ urlr.me/dX7ckG