[ecrea] Call for Papers: Hate speech as political communication; global uses and abuses

*International workshop/conference*

*Title: Hate speech as political communication; global uses and abuses*

*Convenors: Dina Matar, Centre for Global Media and Communication & 
Matti Pohjonen, researcher/research associate CGMC*

**

*Venue: Khalili Lecture Theatre, SOAS*

*Date: 31 May 2018*

*Time 10:00 to 17:00*

**

*Call for papers:*

The public, and intellectual, mood about new media's promise to bring 
about positive change globally has recently turned eerily grim: the 
wisdom of crowds has been replaced by disinformation and fake news; 
grassroots activism by populism identified by its use of racist, 
xenophobic and misogynist hate speech and images in public and media 
spaces. Indeed, it seems that one of the most urgent debates in our 
contemporary social and political lives has become the way communication 
is now failing us. While there is increasing concern over terrorist 
recruitment campaigns on social media, coordinated troll attacks aimed 
at silencing critical voices. Twitter bots manipulating social media 
popularity rankings; online ecosystems of fake news influencing 
elections and eroding the foundations of democracy itself and offline 
strategies and actions, there is no scholarly agreement, let alone a 
common vocabulary, on how to understand the ill-effects of “internet 
freedoms” or how to relate them to the much contested concept of freedom 
of speech.

Much of the academic writing on hate speech remains concerned with 
cause-and-effect, and, in particular, with tracking how or whether 
negative online speech can lead to violence in digital spaces, 
neglecting other spaces where this phenomenon is also prominent. The 
expanding literature suggests that online activity can indeed contribute 
to violence offline in some cases, but it remains theoretically 
unspecified what the differentiated role of “online” activity is, and 
how this causal or quasi-causal relationship can be determined. 
Furthermore, there is little or no attention to different, and perhaps 
contextual, understandings of the “right to communicate” (often referred 
to as ‘freedom of speech’) or to what specific media regulations are in 
place in diverse political/cultural contexts. Finally, while much 
scholarly attention has been accorded to the rise of online hate speech 
in the Western world particularly in the context of migration and 
Islamophobia, little attention has been paid to similar phenomena in 
Asia, Africa and the Middle East where different socio-historical 
contexts and histories of media practices and political uses of hate 
speech need to be acknowledged.

This conference/workshop seeks to move beyond the relatively safe 
purview of Western liberal democracies and address how hate/extreme 
speech has also been widely used and misused as a proxy for all other 
kinds of other political purposes by different actors. Indeed, as 
Gagliardone at al (2015) write that "accusations of fomenting hate 
speech may be traded among political opponents or used by those in power 
to curb dissent and criticism (2015: 10)." The freedom of speech 
organisation, Article 19 (2015: 16), similarly cautions against "too 
readily identifying expressions as "hate speech" ... as its use can also 
have negative consequences ... and can be abused to justify 
inappropriate restrictions on the right to freedom of expression, in 
particular in cases of marginalised or vulnerable communities." These 
concerns become more urgent to address in Asia, Africa, the Middle East 
and South America where contexts of protracted conflict and 
displacement, control measures by political elites and would-be 
political actors, as well as the absence of a consensual approach to 
understanding what ‘the right to communicate’ means, complicate analysis 
further.

Given these difficulties and the widespread rise in the hate speech 
phenomena worldwide, this one-day conference/workshop approaches these 
important debates about hate speech/extreme speech through a comparative 
perspective. Rather than asking what the “effects” of "hate speech" are, 
it will instead look at how hate speech online as well as in other 
spaces has been used as a /distinct form of political communication 
practice /that emerges in diverse//cultures of communication in 
different parts of the world. Foregrounding cultures of communication in 
the analysis allows us to focus on the symbiotic relationship between 
language, culture and politics as well as on diverse practices and 
particular histories of speech cultures.By using comparative approaches 
that address when and what form does hate speech take, and by which 
actors, we hope tocomplicate the discourse of media “risk” increasingly 
invoked to legitimate speech restrictions and ask questions about how 
and under which circumstances do different actors engage in online and 
offline vitriol and their implications, thus widening the lens beyond 
the West and turns the focus on the rapidly expanding media worlds of 
the global South.

We are interested in arguments/articles around mediated hate speech in 
non-Western contexts, including countries in Asia, Africa, Middle East, 
South America and their diasporas. Topics include but are not limited to:

·Hate speech in the context of social, political and ethnic conflict

·Hate speech and freedom of expression

·Media regulation, law and hate speech

·Gendering hate speech

·Hate speech as a form of media practice

·Vernacular language and hate speech

·Hate speech as a form of political violence and/or resistance

·The uses and abuses of hate speech as instruments of power and control

·Genealogies of online hate cultures

·Hate speech and theories of political communication

Please send your abstracts (300 words) to Dina Matar at (dm27 /at/ soas.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(dm27 /at/ soas.ac.uk)>by 31st of March, 2018.

Notifications about acceptance will be sent by 14th of April.

Abstracts should contain an outline of the argument and how it fits the 
theme of the workshop.  Please include a brief biography and affiliation 
together with the abstracts.




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