Thursday March 3 Mathilda Åkerlund, DIGSUM PhD candidate defends her dissertation Far Right, Right Here: Interconnections of Discourse, Platforms, and Users in the Digital Mainstream. The invited opponent is Professor Jessie Daniels, Department of Sociology, Hunter College, United States.
Mathilda’s dissertation is available [here]
The defense is held 13.15 - 15.00 in Aula Biologica, Umeå University, and via Zoom [register here]
While the far right’s increasing political prominence requires large-scale support among the general public, research shows that it might not be people’s political attitudes that have suddenly changed. Instead, the explanation could lie in the far-right’s ability to mobilise supporters. In her dissertation, Mathilda Åkerlund wants to deepen the understanding of one of the most important arenas for far-right mobilisation: the internet. Specifically, that which takes place beyond political parties and extremist far-right sites and content. The dissertation instead focuses on everyday user-generated content on popular social media platforms and online forums. In doing so Mathilda Åkerlund goes beyond the overwhelming bulk of research on the far right which remains focused on electoral politics and explicitly extremist settings.
– My research illustrated how every-day and subtle forms of far-right mobilisation can have far-reaching consequences. Its results can provide insight which helps to deal with the spread also of less explicitly extremist forms of far-right ideas online and calls attention to how digital platforms are failing at preventing this.