22.01.2020 Louisa Buckingham: "Extremist Discourse: Tarrant, Breivik, Rumiyah"

28.01.2020, 14.15, WR 08D03

The Department of English and American Studies invites you to the guest lecture by

Dr Louisa Buckingham
(University of Auckland, New Zealand)

on the topic of

"Extremist Discourse: Tarrant, Breivik, Rumiyah"

Tuesday, January 28 –  14.15  –  Room WR 08D03

"While right-wing supremacist and extremist Islamist discourses are ostensibly ideologically opposed, previous research has posited the existence of ideational and emotive commonalities.

In this seminar, I discuss a recently published corpus-linguistic study in which my co-author and I explore the key psychological dimensions, semantic categories and keywords in the manifestos authored by the perpetrators of the Christchurch and Utøya massacres (the right-wing extremists Brenton Tarrant and Anders Breivik) and in the ISIS propaganda magazine Rumiyah. We identify elements that contribute to the construction of a narrative of hate, peril and urgency. I contextualise the study by discussing the broader social context in New Zealand to shed light on the challenges which have become more apparent after the 2019 massacre in Christchurch."

Dr Louisa Buckingham is a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland, NewZealand. Her wide-ranging professional and research interests include corpus-informed discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.

The lecture takes place in the context of the seminar on "Language Structure" by Prof Dr Rolf Kreyer.