Online hate, digital discourse and critique: Exploring digitally-mediated discursive practices of gender-based hostility

The communicative affordances of the participatory web have opened up new and multifarious channels for the proliferation of hate. In particular, women navigating the cybersphere seem to be the target of a disproportionate amount of hostility. This paper explores the contexts, approaches and conceptual synergies around research on online misogyny within the new communicative paradigm of social media communication (KhosraviNik 2017a: 582). The paper builds on the core principle that online misogyny is demonstrably and inherently a discourse; therefore, the field is envisaged at the intersection of digital media scholarship, discourse theorization and critical feminist explications. As an ever-burgeoning phenomenon, online hate has been approached from a range of disciplinary perspectives but has only been partially mapped at the interface of meaning making contents/processes and new mediation technologies. The paper aims to advance the state of the art by investigating online hate in general, and misogyny in particular, from the vantage point of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS); an emerging model of theorization and operationalization of research combining tenets from Critical Discourse Studies with scholarship in digital media and technology research (KhosraviNik 2014, 2017a, 2018). Our SM-CDS approach to online misogyny demarcates itself from insinuation whereby the phenomenon is reduced to digital communicative affordances per se and argues in favor of a double critical contextualization of research findings at both digital participatory as well as social and cultural levels

Platformed antagonism: Racist discourses on fake Muslim Facebook pages

This research examines how fake identities on social media create and sustain antagonistic and racist discourses. It does so by analysing 11 Danish Facebook pages, disguised as Muslim extremists living in Denmark, conspiring to kill and rape Danish citizens. It explores how anonymous content producers utilise Facebook’s socio-technical characteristics to construct, what we propose to term as, platformed antagonism. This term refers to socio-technical and discursive practices that produce new modes of antagonistic relations on social media platforms. Through a discourse-theoretical analysis of posts, images, ‘about’ sections and user comments on the studied Facebook pages, the article highlights how antagonism between ethno-cultural identities is produced on social media through fictitious social media accounts, prompting thousands of user reactions. These findings enhance our current understanding of how antagonism and racism are constructed and amplified within social media environments

Whose right to the city? An analysis of the mediatized politics of place surrounding alojamento local issues in Lisbon and Porto

In view of the proliferation of alojamento local (short-term vacation rentals) in the major Portuguese cities of Lisbon and Porto, along with the recent transformation of the historic city centre neighbourhoods, this study explores the mediatized politics of place by analysing data sets resulting from different, but interconnected, discursive practices. At the level of governance, we examine how legislation has enabled and facilitated this transformation. We then explore the media coverage of the issues surrounding these recent changes. Finally, we focus on individual and collective stakeholder voices by analysing the various rights claims and arguments found in social media communication channels. Framing our analysis initially in Lefebvre’s concept of ‘the right to the city’, often invoked as an argument for the promotion of justice, inclusion and sustainability in the face of urbanisation policies, we argue that a ‘rights in the city’ approach is better suited to gaining insight into the multiple tensions and conflicts brought about through the interlinking processes of regeneration, gentrification and touristification that affect neighbourhoods with high proportions of short-term rental accommodation, and conclude that there are many rights claimants within a seemingly unified group of stakeholders, invoking rights claims which are sometimes overlapping, but often conflicting.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A discursive review of the textual use of ‘trapped’ in environmental migration studies: The conceptual birth and troubled teenage years of trapped populations

First mooted in 2011, the concept of Trapped Populations referring to people unable to move from environmentally high-risk areas broadened the study of human responses to environmental change. While a seemingly straightforward concept, the underlying discourses around the reasons for being ‘trapped’, and the language describing the concept have profound influences on the way in which policy and practice approaches the needs of populations at risk from environmental stresses and shocks. In this article, we apply a Critical Discourse Analysis to the academic literature on the subject to reveal some of the assumptions implicit within discussing ‘trapped’ populations. The analysis reveals a dominant school of thought that assisted migration, relocation, and resettlement in the face of climate change are potentially effective adaptation strategies along a gradient of migrant agency and governance

Comics Telling Refugee Stories

This chapter begins with an indicative survey of comics responding to the current ‘refugee crisis’. The comics in question adopt one of two distinct and established approaches. The first is reportage, usually featuring the author/creator as a central device, while the second re-works and renders testimony in visual form. In their different ways, both contribute to a wider repertoire of positive and sympathetic representations of refugees, offering a counter-point to hostile media and political discourse, often by a focus on the stories of individuals. Mobilizing compassion and moral responses through personal stories of hardship, trauma, tenacity, and survival has long been a tactic of reformist agendas and humanitarian advocacy. By their qualitative difference from dominant forms of factual discourse, comics offer certain advantages. They may also circumvent certain problems associated with photographic representations of suffering. Such comics can nevertheless run the risk of re-producing established victim tropes, and just as with other forms of representation, human-interest angles carry the potential to obscure political dimensions. In an attempt to consider and situate these concerns, the analysis considers the various positions and relations that constitute ‘refugee comics’: subjects, readers, creators, (im)materiality, and circulation