The growth of internet-enabled social networking sites and messaging services has raised the possibility of wider democratic participation but has also created focal points for expressions of hate and exclusion. ONLINERPOL, the multiyear research project funded by the ERC, takes contemporary landscapes of digital politics in India and the Indian diaspora in Europe as the primary focus, to examine how online media recasts questions of faith and nation, and reshapes political participation.
ONLINERPOL research has highlighted online religious nationalism as a composite expression of divergent aspirations and motivations, with an exclusionary moral discourse that cuts through them. The project is attentive to new online user cultures influenced by gaming, sharing and playfulness, in addition to the traditional tactics of formal politics. These emerging new media practices and discourses are important to consider in any study of contemporary formations of religious politics and nationalism.
The project has examined the global rise of extreme speech, striking a chord with many international research institutions in countries including Denmark, Kenya, the UK, South Africa and the US, which have collaborated with ONLINERPOL. This has resulted in a comparative ethnographic study of online extreme speech, and several edited collections. These publications have shown how online formats such as memes draw strength from local cultural repertoire in ways to energise social approval for various forms of exclusionary extreme speech, including those aimed against immigrants, Muslims and the so-called ‘pseudo-liberals’ or the ‘politically correct.’ These online fun cultures have also led online nationalists to develop a sense of distance and deniability.
AI4Dignity is the latest project that aims to address challenges facing AI-assisted extreme speech moderation. This proof-of-concept project funded by the European Research Council will build a process model for collaborative bottom-up coding by partnering with fact checkers as critical interlocutors in the fight against digital hate and disinformation. The Parterning fact checkers from Brazil, India, Kenya, Germany and other countries will enter into facilitated dialogue with AI/NLP developers in the curated spaces of ‘Counterathon’– the flagship event of AI4Dignity. More information and updates about the project are here.
Nationalism 2.0, a multimedia project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, USA, presents a set of multimedia objects – excerpts of a documentary film, tweet feed, podcasts, still images and printed text – to track aspects of digital mediation that have transformed religion’s play in contemporary politics, with a focus on India and the diaspora. At stake here, we suggest, is the question of what it means to imagine a life of dignity – a life free from fear and regressive shaming, but more vitally filled with onward moving opportunities. The project shows how digital practices of various sorts – archiving, webcasting, tweeting, blogging, mailing, live streaming, trolling, and tagging – have become central to tensions and aspirations surrounding religion, which limit and enable a politics of belonging.
With collaborators at the Technical University of Munich (Juergen Pfeffer and Janina Steinert), this project examines the nature and ramifications of online misogyny and gender-based aggression in a global framework. Recognizing that online misogyny is an important type of online extreme speech and a crucial element of right-wing appeal online, this study has proposed to examine gender-based abuses directed at female politicians and women who are active in political debates (from non-governmental organizations, media, politics and academia) in Brazil, Germany, and India. The second aspect of the analysis concerns intersectional analysis and how women of immigrant background, women of color, and women from religious and ethnic minorities are more severely affected by online misogyny.
The core team of researchers at LMU Munich draws strength from prominent academics on the advisory board and collaborators researching new media in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East alongside North America and Europe. We join the efforts to bring the experiences of new media expansion in regions beyond the West to the forefront of media theory and public debate. These experiences remind us that new media are not just about fake news or filter bubbles, but a shifting amalgam of contradictory possibilities.
At the core of our endeavour is the value of digital dignity – to study and advocate for spaces where political expression can expand in an enabling culture of interactions, without the fear of intimidation or regressive shaming. The Center for Digital Dignity is a virtual network of scholars and activists, with a shared vision to emphasize dignity to foster enabling spaces of political expression. It is an effort to rescue digital cultures of contact from descending into exclusionary discourses based on gender, racist categories, caste, religion and nationality.
For Digital Dignity has received funding from the European Research Council (Grant Agreement Number 714285 and 957442), the Henry Luce Foundation, Cambridge-LMU Strategic Partnership, Bavarian Institute for Digital Transformation (BIDT) and Bayerische Forschungsallianz. The projects are hosted at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Munich, in cooperation with the Department of Communication and Media Research at the university, and a network of collaborators.