Abstract
The communicative affordances of the participatory web have opened up new and multifarious channels for the proliferation of hate. In particular, women navigating the cybersphere seem to be the target of a disproportionate amount of hostility. This paper explores the contexts, approaches and conceptual synergies around research on online misogyny within the new communicative paradigm of social media communication (KhosraviNik 2017a: 582). The paper builds on the core principle that online misogyny is demonstrably and inherently a discourse; therefore, the field is envisaged at the intersection of digital media scholarship, discourse theorization and critical feminist explications. As an ever-burgeoning phenomenon, online hate has been approached from a range of disciplinary perspectives but has only been partially mapped at the interface of meaning making contents/processes and new mediation technologies. The paper aims to advance the state of the art by investigating online hate in general, and misogyny in particular, from the vantage point of Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS); an emerging model of theorization and operationalization of research combining tenets from Critical Discourse Studies with scholarship in digital media and technology research (KhosraviNik 2014, 2017a, 2018). Our SM-CDS approach to online misogyny demarcates itself from insinuation whereby the phenomenon is reduced to digital communicative affordances per se and argues in favor of a double critical contextualization of research findings at both digital participatory as well as social and cultural levels.
About the authors
Majid KhosraviNik is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media & Discourse Studies at Newcastle University. He teaches modules on Digital Discourses & Identity and Politics, Power & Communication at the School of Arts & Cultures while supervising a number of doctoral and post-doctoral projects. He has published widely on critical discourse studies including immigration discourses, self and other representation, national identity, right wing populism, and regional identities in the Middle East. He is specifically interested in digital media discursive practices. Majid researches the intersection of participatory web, discourse and politics by investigating the impact, dynamic and challenges of social media technologies within a Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) model. Majid is a founder of Newcastle Critical Discourse Studies, sits on editorial board of Critical Discourse Studies (Routledge) and Journal of Language & Politics (John Benjamins) while acting as an expert evaluator and moderator for a range of leading international publishers and research grant organizations including the EU commission.
Eleonora Esposito is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the University of Navarra (Spain). She holds a M.A. in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies (University of Naples L’Orientale, 2010) and a PhD / Doctor Europaeus in English Linguistics (University of Naples Federico II, 2015). Her research interests are in the field of Language, Politics, Gender and Society in the European Union and in the Anglophone Caribbean, investigated in the light of Critical Discourse Studies, Multimodal Studies and Translation Studies. Currently, Eleonora is exploring new theoretical perspectives and integrated methodologies for the critical investigation of Social Media Discourses, with a focus on online hostility and misogyny.
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