IJoC Publishes Special Section on Extreme Speech

International Journal of Communication

Publishes a Special Section on
Extreme Speech and Global Digital Cultures

Why is there so much hate on social media? How dangerous is online vitriol for politics and society? Can there be a universal definition of hate speech?

Edited by Sahana Udupa (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität LMU Munich, Germany) and Matti Pohjonen (School of Oriental and African Studies SOAS, UK), this Special Section on Extreme Speech and Global Digital Cultures advances these questions by introducing the concept of “extreme speech” as a critical ethnographic intervention into heated scholarly debates around disinformation, online extremism and hateful communication online. It brings together nine leading scholars researching online vitriol as situated speech cultures, focusing on the actual rather than abstract conditions of possibility for action against it. By taking a distinctly global perspective honed by ethnographic sensibility to broader histories of difference and exclusion, the special section moves the debate beyond legal-normative approaches dominant in North America and Europe, and moral panics around fake news and filter bubbles. It foregrounds the different ways online vitriol is entangled with, and has come to significantly shape, the cultural, social and political fabric of vastly diverse world regions: from Chile, Denmark and Syria to the U.S., Ethiopia, India and Myanmar. Ethnographic explorations of online “extreme speech” open up a new ground to critique the contemporary global conjuncture of exclusionary politics.

We invite you to read this new Special Section of 10 articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on July 10, 2019. Please Ctrl+Click on the titles below for direct hyperlinking to these articles.
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Extreme Speech and Global Digital Cultures — Introduction
Sahana Udupa, Matti Pohjonen

Defining Online Hate and Its “Public Lives”: What is the Place for “Extreme Speech”?
Iginio Gagliardone

A Comparative Approach to Social Media Extreme Speech: Online Hate Speech as Media Commentary
Matti Pohjonen

Ritualized Opposition in Danish Online Practices of Extremist Language and Thought
Peter Hervik

Writing on the Walls: Discourses on Bolivian Immigrants in Chilean Meme Humor
Nell Haynes

Nationalism in the Digital Age: Fun as a Metapractice of Extreme Speech
Sahana Udupa

A Presidential Archive of Lies: Racism, Twitter, and a History of the Present
Carole McGranahan

The Digital Traces of #whitegenocide and Alt-Right Affective Economies of Transgression
Alexandra Deem

Extreme Speech in Myanmar: The Role of State Media in the Rohingya Forced Migration Crisis
Ronan Lee

An Archetypal Digital Witness: The Child Figure and the Media Conflict over Syria
Omar Al-Ghazzi

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Larry Gross
Editor

Arlene Luck
Managing Editor