[Air-L] CCDS Presents a talk with Bharath Ganesh, Friday, February 25th.

[Jeff Hemsley]

The Center for Computational and Data Sciences presents a talk by Bharath Ganesh titled "Transgressive repertoires in the micropolitics of Stormfront's fascist virtual community".

Please join us for Bharath's talk at 12:00PM Eastern Time, on Friday the 25th of February.
Feel free to share this announcement.

Register here: https://forms.gle/ysFyRyvvpm6xAH6VA. A zoom link will follow.

Transgressive repertoires in the micropolitics of Stormfront's fascist virtual community
Work by Bharath Ganesh & Jonathan Bright

Abstract: Right-wing extremists have long used digital communication to produce virtual communities where users can safely transgress normative injunctions against hate, racism, and white supremacy. Using word and document embedding on the widely-studied white supremacist forum Stormfront.org, this paper studies on the role of transgression on the site's various subforums. The paper observes how Stormfront users express their identities through the lens of an embedding space based on a dataset covering the years 2000-2015 and approximately 1.7 million posts. Through this distant reading of transgressive practices on the forum, this paper argues that its virtual community reproduces not only fascism as an ideology, but also as a libidinal economy. Through their expressions on the forum, members of Stormfront's white supremacist community find themselves a unique site to find 'freedom' from their lives, stifled by 'political correctness' and 'Jewish power'. Looking back at this decade and a half of Stormfront activity that precedes the 'mainstreaming' of white supremacist, reactionary, and racist ideas in the networked publics that cut across social media platforms, this paper illustrates a set of transgressive repertoires that sustain and reproduce white supremacist virtual communities and remain crucial as white supremacist digital cultures migrate to 'alt-tech' platforms.

Bio: Bharath Ganesh is an assistant professor of Media Studies at the University of Groningen. His research explores technology, governance, and dignity, and currently focuses on the intersections between platforms and racism, hate speech, and extremism. He studies how extremist networks of users exploit social media platforms as well as how platform companies have responded to this challenge. His recent publications explore the cultures of far right publics online, political communication, disinformation, and platform governance. His recent work can be found in Cultural Studies and Journal of European Integration.


For questions, please email jjhemsle at syr.edu<mailto:jjhemsle at syr.edu>