Antisemitism in Online Communication: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Hate Speech in the Twenty-First Century

Dr Laura Ascone’s research focuses on computer-mediated communication, on the expression of emotions, as well as on hate speech. She defended her PhD in Linguistics at the Université Paris-Seine. Her thesis on “The Radicalisation through the Expression of Emotions on the Internet” dealt with the rhetorical strategies used in both jihadist propaganda and institutional counter-narrative. She then conducted postdoctoral research at the Université de Lorraine on online hate speech against migrants. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) at the Technische Universität Berlin in the international project Decoding Antisemitism. She is also part of various research networks dealing with social issues such as Draine, a research group established as part of the Horizon 2020 European project PRACTICIES (Partnership against violent radicalisation in the cities).

Karolina Placzynta is a linguist and political scientist with a background in pragmatics, sociolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. Her research is centred on the mainstreaming and marginalisation of discourses in the media, normalisation of bias, and intersections of discriminatory discourses. Before joining the UK team of the Decoding Antisemitism project, she researched the patterns of discursive representations of immigration in the British press, in the process examining online media debates within the political mainstream. Apart from discourses of migration, racism and antisemitism, she is interested in the language of misogyny and gender inequality, as well as the language of social class dynamics. As an experienced educator, she is interested in translating research findings into successful strategies for teaching and training. She is a member of the DiscourseNet association.

Chloé Vincent is currently preparing a PhD at Ghent University on how gender neutral pronouns in French affect text quality and mental gender representations. She previously worked on the French team of the Decoding Antisemitism project as a researcher and expert in quantitative analysis. She completed her MA in Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London in September 2020 where she specialised in sociolinguistics, learning both quantitative and qualitative methods. Her master’s thesis consisted in analysing the attitudes of native French speakers towards French regional accents. In the previous years, she had completed her undergraduate degree in anthropology at Lumière University Lyon 2, and a degree in French language teaching at Grenoble Alpes University, while working as a software developer. She also holds a Master of Engineering degree from Grenoble INP Graduate School of Engineering.