[ecrea] CfP International (funded) workshop on online extreme speech

Call for papers

International Workshop
Global Perspectives on Extreme Speech Online

10-11 December 2018

Venue: The House of Artists, Munich, Germany

Organized by

Sahana Udupa, University of Munich (LMU), Germany
Peter Hervik, Aalborg University, Denmark
Iginio Gagliardone, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

 Extended abstract deadline: 1 November 2018

Full papers due: 3 December 2018
 Online cultures of political aggression and hateful speech have come 
to the center of public debate and concern, as right-wing nationalist 
and populist waves have swept political cultures with a new lexicon of 
exclusionary moral discourse aimed against minoritized groups. In North 
America and Europe, the rise of the “far-right” and “neonationalist” 
movements in the last two decades have triggered and relied on online 
belligerence of racialized joking, intimidation and “fact-filled” 
untruths (Banks & Gingrich, 2006; Hervik 2016). In countries like 
Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, Kenya and South Africa, major social media 
services such as Facebook and Whatsapp have not only offered an easy 
platform to revive vitriol against religious minorities and ethnic 
“others”, but they have also led to a “subterranean” flow of rumor and 
fear mongering, injecting a new velocity to mob lynching and targeted 
physical violence (Gagliardone et al. 2017; Lee, 2019; Udupa, 2018). 
Digital expressions have pushed back liberal modulations of “civility”, 
drawing strength from locally approved cultural idioms, globally shared 
formats of humor and historically sanctioned structures of animosity 
(Udupa & Pohjonen, 2019). While huge numbers of dispersed, unorganized 
“ordinary” online users are participating in online extreme speech 
practices, regimes have also engaged organized production of 
disinformation by making use of the very infrastructure of globalization 
around flexible, precarious and outsourced labour (Ong and Cabanes, 
2018). We capture these digitally mediated  moral outrage and vitriol 
for overt and implicit political goals as online “extreme speech”. By 
defining online vitriol of political exclusion as “extreme speech”, we 
depart from the regulatory-normative debates of “hate speech”. We 
instead draw attention to media practices and how and why online actors 
engage in forms of speech that are disapproved in other contexts of 
interaction.
 In this international workshop, we extend our effort to place the 
vitriolic face of the Internet in a critical global conversation backed 
with ethnographic sensibility – studies that are attuned to the 
understanding of lived practices and narratives of online actors, 
historically shaped political structures, and online affordances in 
situated contexts. We consider online actors to include i. dispersed yet 
ideologically active individual producers of exclusionary extreme 
speech, ii. semi-organized groups of volunteers and organized groups for 
right wing movements and ethnic/racial hatred, iii. minoritized groups 
targeted by extreme speech (refugees, immigrants, “liberals”, humanists, 
religious/ethnic groups), iv. politically “agnostic” paid trolls, v. 
business minded digital influencers, as well as vi. civil society 
groups, individuals and community associations engaged in creative 
resistance to online extreme speech.
 Recognizing the global spread of online extreme speech, we invite 
submissions that can take the debate beyond the Euro-American concerns 
around “fake news” and “echo chambers”. We invite submissions that are 
especially attentive to local idioms, media practices and tensions that 
have made online extreme speech a daily reality of everyday politics, 
with profound implications for how belonging is imagined, enacted and 
brutally enforced in different parts of the world.  Attendance to this 
closed workshop is fully funded. Organizers will cover the costs of 
travel and accommodation. Submissions will contribute to a planned 
co-edited volume, and should therefore not be under consideration for 
publication elsewhere.
 Please send your extended abstracts (1200 words) to 
(extremespeechworkshop2018 /at/ gmail.com)  before 1 November 2018. Selected 
participants will be notified by 10 November 2018. Abstracts should 
contain a clear outline of the argument, theoretical framework, 
methodology, ethnographic material (findings if applicable), and a brief 
note on how your research links to the overall theme of the workshop. 
Please also include 3-5 keywords that describe your work, and a short 
bio (max 100 words, stating affiliation). Full papers (6000 words) of 
selected submissions are due on 3 December 2018.
 Topics include
I Field based media practice research and ethnographic explorations of
1.     Common online users and political aggression
2.     Organized production of trolls and vitriol
3.     Digital rumor, virality and mob violence
4.     Internet memes, jokes and exclusion
5.     Victims of online extreme speech
6.     Resistance to online extreme speech
 II New mixed methods using ethnography and data analysis of extreme 
speech  III Field based explorations of regulating online extreme speech 
with fine grained analysis of the tussles among Internet service 
providers, social networking sites, state regulators, civil society 
groups and individual activists.   The workshop is hosted by Project 
ONLINERPOL (www.fordigitaldignity.com) funded by the European Research 
Council (Grant Agreement Number 714285) at the Ludwig Maximilian 
University (LMU), Germany.

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