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

[sahana udupa]

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.