[Air-L] Reminder: CfP International (funded) workshop on online extreme speech, 10-11 December 2018

[sahana udupa]

A gentle reminder. Abstract deadline: 1 November 2018.
Apologies for cross-posting.
Best wishes
Sahana


On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 3:02 PM sahana udupa <sahanaudupa.nk at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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 <extremespeech2018 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.
>
>