Hate speech at the crossroads of aggression, anxiety, and resonance: from linguistics to politics and beyond
Instituto Cultura y Sociedad (ICS)
Public Discourse Research Group
Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain
6-7 June 2023
Keynote Speaker: Prof. Dr. Catarina Kinnvall, Department of Political Science, Lund University
Nowadays, prototypical instances of hate speech originating in extremist circles coexist with many other more implicit messages that spread through mainstream media and actors. Since these resonate with various groups in society, they often end up being shared by many different users in social networks. This has led to the trivialization of verbal aggression and exclusionary discourses, and promotes an underlying atmosphere of anxiety and insecurity that has an impact on everyday life. This symposium aims to create an interdisciplinary venue for discussion to explore more closely the relations between aggressively exclusionary discourses with a special focus on hate speech and perceptions of insecurity accompanied by feelings of anxiety and alienation.
The phenomenon of hate speech extends from populist, nativist, ultra-nationalist and xenophobic political discourses to everyday interaction within civil society, and from media communication to ordinary people’s practices in social media or face to face. In order to understand the far-reaching spread of hate speech, this call is especially interested in, but not limited to, research on the linguistic, pragmatic, semiotic or discursive characteristics of hate speech; on the underlying social, psychological and socio-economic factors or possible social and political consequences of hate speech; on how discourses of hate and exclusion resonate with specific individuals or groups and why; on how such discourses tap into and amplify pre-existing anxieties and insecurities or even create new ones for the targeted and targeting groups.
In recent years, a large volume of research on this subject has been produced by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds. From a linguistic perspective, for example, one relevant area is how hate speech is verbally constructed and performed, with particular attention to the different linguistic and discursive patterns used to express hatred or contempt (Assimakopoulos et al. 2017; Knoblock 2022), including slurs (Technau 2018), dehumanising metaphors (Sakki & Castrén 2022) and other impoliteness strategies (Culpeper 2021; Guillén-Nieto 2023). Other studies have approached covert hate speech (Baider 2022) by deconstructing the implicit strategies used in its construction, such as humour, irony (Baider & Constantinou 2017; Fuchs & Schäfer 2020) or hedging (Baumgarten et al. 2019: 95-97).
On the other hand, ontological security studies in political science already take seriously both . . . READ MORE