Friday March 4 10.15 - 12.00 Professor Jessie Daniels, Hunter College, United States will give a talk on Combatting the Far Right: In the Streets, Online and around the World, at the Department of Sociology, Umeå University. The talk is given at Rum för lärande and via Zoom. For access to the zoom-link please contact Samuel Merrill
Abstract
“I feel like we’ve discovered a vulnerability in the death star.” That’s how Richard Wilson, Executive Director of the London-based grassroots organization, Stop Funding Hate, described his work when I spoke with him in late September, 2021. The mention of the “death star,” is, of course, a Star Wars reference. The “vulnerability,” Wilson has identified is the organization’s strategy of pointing out to advertisers when their ads are being used to spread hate and division, and then persuading them to pull that support.Stop Funding Hate is one in a growing contingent of grassroots organizers, digital activists, researchers, attorneys and policy advocates who are combatting the spread of white supremacy online in fresh and innovative ways. In a new phase of work that I began some thirty years ago, I am launching a large, collaborative research project that will include interviews with agents of change, like Wilson, who are pushing back against the far right around the world, in the streets and online.
Efforts like this small, strategic intervention raise questions about how we can combat the far right. Alongside Wilson’s Stop Funding Hate, there is a growing contingent of grassroots organizers, journalists, researchers, policy advocates, and digital hacktivists who are taking on the far right in innovative ways. In a new phase of work begun some thirty years ago, in this talk, Jessie Daniels an internationally recognized expert on the Internet manifestations of racism, will talk about a large collaborative research project that investigates those who are pushing back against the far right in the streets, online and around the world.