A huge thank you to all of our participants for such a wonderful event! We put a lot of work in on our end, but ultimately the fruitful academic and social exchange that took place all came down to the contributions of our 212 participants, coming from 42 countries and every continent except Australia and Antarctica. It was such a pleasure to host you in Helsinki, and we hope that you'll all come back - and bring friends! - for HEPP6 in May 2026. Look out for our CfP in mid-2025!
This event was part of a long running effort of the HEPP research group. The 5th Helsinki Conference on Emotions Populism and Polarisation, HEPP5, took place on 4-7 March 2025. As always, the event brought together scholars working on populist mobilisation, rhetoric, and logics across the world.
This time, the event drew particularly on the research group’s work on the Social Contract in the CO3 Horizon project, and resilience, from the Trans-Atlantic ENDURE project. There will also be special sessions on the preliminary results of research done on the European Parliamentary Elections in 2024, which the group studied across Europe on social media focusing on short videos from Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. We were very excited to welcome our three keynote speakers: Dr. Marina Prentoulis, Dr. Asel Doolotkeldieva, and Dr. Allan Dreyer Hansen. You can read more about them and their talks on our Keynote Speakers page, and you can watch Allan's and Marina's speeches on our YouTube channel.
The HEPP research group and the conferences are famed for their friendly, informal, and fun atmosphere, which we were very happy to replicate in 2025.
The HEPP4 conference was held at the University of Helsinki 11-13 December 2023, with a special symposium day at the University of Lapland on 14 December 2023.* The conference was organised on-site with hybrid options and streamed keynote sessions. The first edition took place before the pandemic in 2019, HEPP2 was fully virtual, and since HEPP3, we have operated in a fully hybrid format.
Follow us on our main webpage, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You can also check the previous keynotes on our YouTube.