6 RESULTS
2025OnlinePanel 18Saturday 27th September 2025Fulgrim vs Ferrus Manus (c) Games Workshop

Masse und Macht und Waaagh: Orks through Canetti’s Crowds and Power

Oi! Why is it that when more boyz get in a mob, they become more killy? Or, to put the question in a more academic parlance, what is the connection between crowds and power? Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht, 1960) presents an enduring theory of mass behaviour, examining how crowds form, move, …

2025OnlinePanel 18Saturday 27th September 2025Fulgrim vs Ferrus Manus (c) Games Workshop

Reluctant Gods: Divine Interveners Resisting Deification

This presentation explores the ironic tensions between the Emperor of Mankind and Lion El’Johnson’s respective aversions to deification and their eventual embodiment of divine roles within the Warhammer universe. Drawing on the events of *Son of the Forest* , as well as other texts, we examine how the Emperor performs the role of a “Divine …

2025OnlinePanel 18Saturday 27th September 2025Fulgrim vs Ferrus Manus (c) Games Workshop

Mechanicus as Mirror: Expressions of developments in ontology, cyberfeminism, and scientific philosophy

This talk is a diachronic analysis of the Mechanicus. We will examine recent and historical cultural attitudes relevant to the Adeptus Mechanicus, in accordance with our practice of using Warhammer 40k itself as a framework to explore critical theory and historical concepts, rather than exploring Warhammer 40k through these frameworks, a reversal of the lens …

2024OnlinePanel 18Saturday 28th September 2024Warhammer 40k

The Future of Animated Fear: Grimdark as a Genre Framework for Speculative Horror in Animation

Abstract Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40K (WH40K) is widely regarded as the progenitor of the Grimdark genre: a simple tagline in a magazine advertisement that read ‘In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war’ spawned a universe of hopeless, superstitious and terrifying visions of mankind’s future. It was a black mirror that …

2024OnlinePanel 18Saturday 28th September 2024Warhammer 40k

Abandon reason, know only war! From Just War to just War in Warhammer 40k

Abstract Warhammer 40k shows humanity in a complex, yet simple situation. Surrounded by multiple hostile species, war changed from a project to unite all humanity under the guide of the emperor to a eternal necessity, no matter what the cost of ‘xenos’ or even human lives. This raises questions about legitimate self-defense, imperial conquest, genocide …

2024OnlinePanel 18Saturday 28th September 2024Warhammer 40k

“Ask Not Why, Just Do”: The Eerie Agency of the Imperium of Man

Warhammer 40,000 is by the admission of its creators, a satire of Britain in the 1980s. It is a representation of a squalid, sprawling failed empire, where human life has ceased to matter as anything other than oil for the machinery of a broken state. In this talk I will characterise this satire using the …