Introduction—The Curse of Relevance: Challenges Facing Right-Wing Studies

For at least the past decade, researchers of right-wing ideologies, movements, and media around the world have been met with a familiar refrain from interlocutors outside the field: "Oh!That's so relevant!"While perhaps a blessing in terms of renewed popular interest (e.g., publication opportunities and, albeit to a lesser extent, funding), many right-wing studies scholars would much rather the topic remain arcane and inconsequential."The right" has historically been used as an umbrella concept to make sense of a diverse array of political tendencies around the world, although a globally coherent definition has itself proved elusive.Some scholars have associated the right with closely related concepts such as nativism, populism, authoritarianism, and terrorism, variously qualifying its iterations as radical, far, extreme, or mainstream.The term has also been commonly used to refer to pro-capitalist, inegalitarian, chauvinist, and other political formations more broadly (e.g., "conservatism" in the United States and United Kingdom, and "neoliberalism" in other country contexts). 1Studying such an 1For illustrative examples, see Justin Gest, "The White Working-Class Minority: A Counter-Narrative," Politics, Groups, and Identities 4, no. 1 (