Papers by Marcel Klapp, PhD
Im Rahmen des vorliegenden Abschlussberichts werden die zentralen Beobachtungen und Ergebnisse de... more Im Rahmen des vorliegenden Abschlussberichts werden die zentralen Beobachtungen und Ergebnisse des vom Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen geförderten Forschungsprojektes "Salafiyya leben. Religiöse Ideale und muslimische Praxis in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft" zusammengefasst. Der Fokus des Projekts lag auf den Prozessen und Dynamiken, die sich im Spannungsfeld zwischen den normativen dogmatischen Prinzipien des quietistischen, nicht gewaltbereiten Salafismus und der Alltagspraxis salafistischer Akteure in den verschiedenen Öffentlichkeiten des urbanen Forschungsfeldes vollziehen. Hierzu führte der Autor eine ethnographische Feldforschung in einer westdeutschen Großstadt durch, die den Charakter einer Langzeitstudie aufweist, welche die Prozesshaftigkeit des Sozialen abbilden kann. Aus Perspektive dreier salafistischer bzw. vormals salafistischer Akteure, sowie zahlreicher weiterer Gesprächspartner:innen, wurden die Entwicklungen des kleinen primär quietistisch-salafistischen Netzwerks rekonstruiert und in akteurszentrierten Fallstudien die Selbst-und Fremdverortungen der Gesprächspartner in verschiedenen muslimischen und nicht muslimischen Öffentlichkeiten analysiert.
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Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht eBooks, Feb 13, 2023
Der Islamische Religionsunterricht (IRU) wird oftmals als Ort der Aushandlung von Identifikatione... more Der Islamische Religionsunterricht (IRU) wird oftmals als Ort der Aushandlung von Identifikationen und persönlicher Positionierung junger Muslim*innen verstanden, an dem die Zugehörigkeit zum Islam im Kontext des zunehmend islamfeindlichen öffentlichen Diskurses thematisiert werden könne. Trotz dieser zugesprochenen gesellschaftlichen Relevanz wird das Geschehen am Ort der Aushandlungen in situ und die Schüler*innen als Zielgruppe pädagogischen Handelns in actu in der empirischen Forschung zum IRU bislang wenig beachtet. Um einen Vorschlag zur Schließung dieser Lücke zu formulieren, stützte ich mich auf empirisches Material, das an einem Gymnasium im Ruhrgebiet ethnographisch erhoben wurde und fokussiere auf ein Unterrichtsmodul zu der Frage "Inwiefern ist der Islam gewalttätig?". Aus einer pragmatisch-praxeologischen Perspektive untersuche ich die Selbstpositionierungen und kritischen Handlungskompetenzen, die schüler*innenseitig geltend gemacht werden, um sich gegenüber dem islamkritischen Gewaltvorwurf der öffentlichen Debatte und der Gewaltdarstellungen der islamischen Geschichte sinnhaft zu verorten. Dabei werden Komplexitäten des Schüler*innenhandelns und der Spezifik konkreter Unterrichtsarrangements sichtbar, die sich gemeinhin der Aufmerksamkeit der Lehrkraft entziehen. Daher kann, so behaupte ich, ein pragmatisch informierter ethnographischer Ansatz einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Begründbarkeit didaktischen Handelns leisten.
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Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, Jun 26, 2018
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Journal of Muslims in Europe
The article examines the media practices of a German Salafi missionary through the perspective of... more The article examines the media practices of a German Salafi missionary through the perspective of theories on Islamic authority and digital online marketing. Following an understanding of online Salafism as a cross-platform phenomenon, the paper draws on an ethnographic case study of Salafi Influencer Abdurrashid, examining the specific strategies he develops for his channels on YouTube and TikTok, the synergies he generates between them, and the active outreach measures through which he creates a gateway for his YouTube profile via TikTok in order to gain authority.
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Journal of Muslims in Europe, 2023
The article examines the media practices of a German Salafi missionary through the perspective of... more The article examines the media practices of a German Salafi missionary through the perspective of theories on Islamic authority and digital online marketing. Following an understanding of online Salafism as a cross-platform
phenomenon, the paper drawson an ethnographic case study of SalafiInfluencer Abdurrashid, examining the specifi strategies he develops for his channels on YouTube and TikTok, the synergies he generates between them, and the active outreach measures through which he creates a gateway for his YouTube profile via TikTok in order to gain authority.
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Badawia, T. & Topalovic, S. (Hg.): Islamunterricht im Diskurs. Religionspädagogische und Fachdidaktische Ansätze, 2023
Der Islamische Religionsunterricht (IRU) wird oftmals als Ort der Aushandlung von Identifikatione... more Der Islamische Religionsunterricht (IRU) wird oftmals als Ort der Aushandlung von Identifikationen und persönlicher Positionierung junger Muslim*innen verstanden, an dem die Zugehörigkeit zum Islam im Kontext des zunehmend islamfeindlichen öffentlichen Diskurses thematisiert werden könne. Trotz dieser zugesprochenen gesellschaftlichen Relevanz wird das Geschehen am Ort der Aushandlungen in situ und die Schüler*innen als Zielgruppe pädagogischen Handelns in actu in der empirischen Forschung zum IRU bislang wenig beachtet. Um einen Vorschlag zur Schließung dieser Lücke zu formulieren, stützte ich mich auf empirisches Material, das an einem Gymnasium im Ruhrgebiet ethnographisch erhoben wurde und fokussiere auf ein Unterrichtsmodul zu der Frage "Inwiefern ist der Islam gewalttätig?". Aus einer pragmatisch-praxeologischen Perspektive untersuche ich die Selbstpositionierungen und kritischen Handlungskompetenzen, die schüler*innenseitig geltend gemacht werden, um sich gegenüber dem islamkritischen Gewaltvorwurf der öffentlichen Debatte und der Gewaltdarstellungen der islamischen Geschichte sinnhaft zu verorten. Dabei werden Komplexitäten des Schüler*innenhandelns und der Spezifik konkreter Unterrichtsarrangements sichtbar, die sich gemeinhin der Aufmerksamkeit der Lehrkraft entziehen. Daher kann, so behaupte ich, ein pragmatisch informierter ethnographischer Ansatz einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Begründbarkeit didaktischen Handelns leisten.
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Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 147. 223-226, 2022
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Lodz Papers in Pragmatics. DeGruyter, 2018
The article sheds light on programs and measures against Islamist-extremist messages both by gove... more The article sheds light on programs and measures against Islamist-extremist messages both by governmental and non-governmental institutions in Germany. The “German way” for the most part is characterized through its renouncement of counter-terrorist narration through campaigns. Instead, decentralized, horizontal and “value-based” forms of strategic communication are being established. Therefore, German governmental as well as non-governmental institutions are currently developing educational programs in order to not only debunk extremist myths but rather to enable youngsters to critically reflect on mechanisms of ideologically charged communication. Although the field of practices is multi-branched and diverse, we will make an effort to concisely map areas of action, structures of sponsorship and (educational) measures concerning Islamism in Germany. The educational material ‘Salam Online’ which was developed and produced by staff and students of the religious education department o...
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Overview of the Special Issue
The contributions in this Special Issue address various aspects of... more Overview of the Special Issue
The contributions in this Special Issue address various aspects of hostile narratives and attempts at dealing with them or countering them. They discuss both theoretical and practical challenges of studying hate speech and other types of prejudiced discourses, along with educational initiatives and other forms of moral courage on the part of individuals (Osswald et al. 2012).
In the first contribution, Björn Technau adopts a pragmatic perspective to examine the structural and functional characteristics of slur terms. Taking group-based slurs with their complex semantics under scrutiny, Technau situates them in the context of hate speech, thus revisiting definitions of the latter and providing an overview of the results of previous research. Politicians, for example, as he points out, tend to avoid explicitly racist terms, appealing instead to voters’ latent racism. His analysis of the pejorative, non-pejorative and neutral uses of ethnic slur terms, including cases of appropriation, leads him to the conclusion that to get a clear, accurate and comprehensive picture of the pragmatics of slur terms we need “to account for individual differences in their frequencies of use, their modes of use, and their pragmatic effects”.
In the article that follows, KhosraviNik and Esposito also underline the importance of various contextual factors which need to be considered while studying online hate. These, they argue can be situated on three levels: the social, cultural, as well as digital participatory level, and thus require an interdisciplinary approach. The authors set out to explore the interface between the social media communication paradigm, along with affordances it is based on, and cyberhate. Approaching online communication from the Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) perspective they identify and discuss diverse ways (including a sense of anonymity and de-individuation) in which the participatory web enables and facilitates incivility and violent behavior online. Since the main focus here is on verbal aggression targeting women – online misogyny – KhosraviNik and Esposito examine its various forms, going beyond the phenomena of trolling and flaming, along with motivations behind it and its social implications.
Questions concerning gender and sexuality and how these two are discursively constructed within hegemonic heterosexuality and heteronormativity paradigms are the focus of Fabienne Baider’s contribution. Applying a Foucauldian approach to sexualities in her quantitative and qualitative analysis of online comments focused on the LGBT community, the author identifies a range of frames and topoi used to construct LGBT identities in the Greek Cypriot context. Arguments forming the basis of homophobic hate speech, she demonstrates, draw on the notions of safety and security, family values and morality, majority vs majority rules, and pathology, and form part of wider institutional discourses of social stability, national continuity, even the nation’s survival. Baider argues here for the link between nationalism and compulsory hegemonic heteronormativity and emphasises the socio-normative impact of the Orthodox Church, once again highlighting the need for a fully-fledged contextual analysis of hostile narratives, taking into account their historical, socio-political, and cultural embedding.
Jurate Ruzaite’s contribution sheds light on the role that corpus linguistic methods and tools may play in the identification of hate speech in public discourse. Such identification process, as she demonstrates, is fraught with challenges, for example the lack of bias indicators, different genre conventions, and language variation due to diachronic change. Her study of Lithuanian online comments, which involves the analysis of wordlists, collocations, and formulaic language with the AntConc software, allows for identification of dominant patterns in the representation of certain groups. Yet, it also shows that rather than being overtly manifested in lexis, aggression is often expressed indirectly through creative language use, thus requiring qualitative methods of analysis.
The following three contributions focus on various dimensions of anti-immigration sentiment and their discursive manifestations, in particular in the British context. Andreas Musolff examines hostile attitudes towards multilingualism and multiculturalism. His analysis of the press and forum data reveals that the presence of foreign languages in the British public sphere is perceived as a threat to the “home” culture and thus, for the most part, is evaluated negatively. Despite being moderated, the Internet forum becomes a powerful platform to legitimise anti-immigrant attitudes: individual narratives based on commenters’ supposedly negative experience act as powerful argumentative tools, appealing to the general public’s emotions and concerns. Additionally, as Musolff points out, such negative perception and representation of multilingualism and multiculturalism is both constituted by and constitutive for dominant media discourses on migration.
Monika Kopytowska and Paul Chilton’s paper discusses Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech and its reception 50 years later in view of the rising anti-immigration sentiment and Brexit campaign. The authors provide an overview of dominant themes in migration-related discourses, devoting particular attention to the threat construction process. Drawing on the insights from neuroscience and cognitive linguistics, they demonstrate how particular lexical expressions and discursive strategies can act as powerful triggers of fear and anxiety, and thus potentially influence the audience’s cognitive, affective, and behavioural responses (which, they show, had its manifestations in the Brexit referendum voting patterns). In their analysis of Enoch Powell’s speech and its contemporary social media rendition, the authors explore the mechanisms underlying the process of recontextualization and the role of this process in facilitating the spread of hostile and prejudiced discourses.
Katerina Strani and Anna Szczepaniak Kozak also focus on anti-immigrant discourse and patterns of representation it employs. Analysing texts from the UK and Polish media, along with data from interviews with migrants, the authors identify discursive strategies of othering and their potential impact on the groups concerned. Among the strategies used with the aim of categorising, denigrating, oppressing and ultimately rejecting the Other five strategies present in both British and Polish data are identified and discussed, namely: (1) stereotyping, (2) whiteness as the norm, (3) racialization, (4) objectification, and (5) wrongly ascribed ethnicity. The interview data also provides important insights into the application of the above strategies and their effects in real life situations in which foreigners are involved.
The last two contributions shed light on the educational dimension of hate speech prevention as well as practices related to anti-extremism and counter-radicalisation. Marcel Klapp’s paper discusses programs and measures against Islamist-extremist messages implemented by both governmental and non-governmental institutions in Germany. Highlighting the need for “decentralized, horizontal and ‘value-based’ forms of strategic communication” Klapp argues that the main purpose of such educational and awareness-raising activities should be to enable young people to properly understand and respond to the ideologically loaded, hostile and/or prejudiced content. The “Salam Online” educational material produced by Zentrum für Islamische Theologie Münster, which Klapp presents here, serves as an example of an approach to countering Islamist-extremist ideology through enhancing media literacy, critical thinking and promoting “social models of coherence and commonality”.
Jelena Vujić, Mirjana Daničić and Tamara Aralica address one more important aspect of mediating hostility in the public sphere, namely translators’ work. Having identified the linguistico-pragmatic features of hate speech present in presidential campaigns-related discourse in the USA and Serbia in 2016 and 2017, the authors discuss the results of the case study concerning translation exercises based on these hateful texts which were used to examine Serbian students’ attitudes towards ethically and morally challenging language contents in their mother tongue and in English. While the groups targeted and the strategies are similar, Vujić et al. observe that translators’ moral and ethical norms are stronger in the former case, which is likely to affect the translational output (in translators’ mother tongue). The article thus brings up important questions about the role of translators, corroborating Mona Baker’s (2006: 151) argument that translators and interpreters are not “detached unaccountable professionals whose involvement begins and ends with the delivery of a linguistic product […] Consciously or otherwise, they translate texts and utterances that participate in creating, negotiating and contesting social reality”.
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Aktuelle Forschung zu sog. Gegennarrativen (engl. counter-narratives) in der Islamismusprävention... more Aktuelle Forschung zu sog. Gegennarrativen (engl. counter-narratives) in der Islamismusprävention richtet den Blick vornehmlich auf die Wirkung und Überzeugungskraft von strategisch gegen extremistische Propaganda positionierten Kommunikationskampagnen. Aus diskurstheoretischer Perspektive lassen sich Gegennarrative aber als hegemoniale Ordnungsversuche beschreiben, die in der Arena konkurrierender Islamdiskurse Geltung beanspruchen. Während medienwissenschaftliche Rezeptionsstudien den sozialen Kontext der Zielgruppe gänzlich ausblenden und Diskursanalyse sich gemeinhin auf die Analyse multimodaler Texte konzentriert, entwirft Marcel Klapp eine analytische Perspektive für die Untersuchung von Erzählungen von Islam und Muslimsein in unterschiedlichen sozialen Kontexten der Alltagswelt jugendlicher Muslime. Das Jugendzentrum, die Moscheegemeinde, der Islamsiche Religionsunterricht und die Peer Group werden als narrative Praxisgemeinschaften konzeptualisiert. Klapp schlägt zu deren Untersuchung das Programm der narrativen Ethnographie vor, um die Jugendlichen als Akteure im Spannungsfeld widerstreitender Islamdiskurse zu analysieren und lokale Narrative zu erheben.
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Jahrbuch für Islamische Theologie und Religionspädagogik 5/2016, 2018
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Sindyan Qasem und Marcel Klapp stellen sogenannte Gegennarrative (abgeleitet von engl., counter n... more Sindyan Qasem und Marcel Klapp stellen sogenannte Gegennarrative (abgeleitet von engl., counter narrative) als oft geforderten und scheinbar essentiellen Bestandteil von Islamismusprävention in den Mittelpunkt ihres Interesses. Das Ziel ist dabei eine Verkomplizierung des gängigen Verständnisses von Gegennarrativen als gemeinhin attraktive und überzeugungskräftige Kommunikationsmittel im Einsatz gegen islamistische Propaganda. Qasem und Klapp beschreiben vielmehr in Rückgriff auf erzähl- und diskurstheoretische Ausführungen, inwiefern Gegennarrative stets hegemoniale Ordnungsversuche konstituieren und wie infolgedessen teilweise Ausschlussmechanismen bedient und Wertekämpfe postuliert werden.
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Lodz Papers in Pragmatics. De Gruyter, 2018
The article sheds light on programs and measures against Islamist-extremist messages both by gove... more The article sheds light on programs and measures against Islamist-extremist messages both by governmental and non-governmental institutions in Germany. The “German way” for the most part is characterized through its renouncement of counter-terrorist narration through campaigns. Instead, decentralized, horizontal and “value-based” forms of strategic communication are being established. Therefore, German governmental as well as non-governmental institutions are currently developing educational programs in order to not only debunk extremist myths but rather to enable youngsters to critically reflect on mechanisms of ideologically charged communication. Although the field of practices is multi-branched and diverse, we will make an effort to concisely map areas of action, structures of sponsorship and (educational) measures concerning Islamism in Germany.
The educational material ‘Salam Online’ which was developed and produced by staff and students of the religious education department of Zentrum für Islamische Theologie Münster will be presented as one approach to countering Islamist-extremist ideology through debunking, critical reading and the proposition of social models of coherence and commonality.
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Teaching Documents by Marcel Klapp, PhD
digital-salam.de ist ein online Archiv mit Unterrichtsmaterialien, Konzepten und Videos, die ei... more digital-salam.de ist ein online Archiv mit Unterrichtsmaterialien, Konzepten und Videos, die einen vielfältigen Blick auf Islam in Deutschland werfen und einen Beitrag leisten sollen, vereinfachten Weltbildern und Islamverständnissen, wie sie das Internet dominieren, entgegenzuwirken. Um dem komplexen Phänomen islamistisch-ideologisierender Online-Ansprachen begegnen zu können, müssen politisch-bildnerische, religions- und medienpädagogische Lernziele zusammengebracht werden. Unter diesen Aspekten haben wir Fragestellungen und Methoden entwickelt, mit denen YouTube Videos, welche die Basis jedes Bausteins bilden, bearbeitet werden. Die Bausteine können einzeln angewandt oder flexibel kombiniert werden.
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Organization of Conferences and Workshops by Marcel Klapp, PhD
Religiöser Fundamentalismus stellt unsere Gesellschaft vor neue Herausforderungen. Präventionsarb... more Religiöser Fundamentalismus stellt unsere Gesellschaft vor neue Herausforderungen. Präventionsarbeit wird zunehmend als gesamtgesellschaftliche Aufgabe wahrgenommen und dadurch kommt auch dem Islamischen Religionsunterricht besondere Aufmerksamkeit zu. Hier stellt sich die Frage nach der Rolle der Lehrerinnen und Lehrer und danach, was diese hinsichtlich der Prävention vor Radikalisierung Jugendlicher leisten können. Wie kann der bewusste Umgang mit islamischen Quellen zur Herausbildung einer muslimischen Identität beitrage und wie wichtig ist eine überzeugende Selbstpositionierung der Lehrkräfte? Welche Faktoren führen überhaupt zu einer Radikalisierung? Wie gehe ich mit auffälligen Jugendlichen um und welche Wege gibt es aus der fortgeschrittenen Radikalisierung heraus?
Die Fortbildung wird den Teilnehmenden Informationen und Anregungen geben, wie Schritte zu Prävention und Deradikalisierung eingeleitet werden können und welche Möglichkeiten es gibt, das Thema gewaltbereiter Salafismus im Unterricht zu thematisieren.
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Film by Marcel Klapp, PhD
D | 2015 | 30'
Winner International Film Festival for Spirituality, Visionary & Religion 2016, ... more D | 2015 | 30'
Winner International Film Festival for Spirituality, Visionary & Religion 2016, Indonesien.
Official Selection Turkish Film Festival 2016, Boston, USA.
Official Selection Equalitiy Festival 2016, Kiew, Ukraine.
Official Selection Christian Life International Film Festival 2017, Ontario, Kanada.
Official Selection What a Short Intl. Film Festival 2017, Delhi, Indien.
Official Selection Faith and Spirituality Short Film Festival (theaudienceawards.com), Online, USA.
Der Film Himmelsreisen gibt Einblicke in den „Ritualtanz” der Aleviten, einer Religionsgemeinschaft aus Anatolien. Während ihnen in ihrem Ursprungsland der Türkei bis heute die rechtliche Anerkennung vorenthalten wird, gelten sie in Deutschland seit 2007 offiziell als Religionsgemeinschaft nach dem Grundgesetz. Da die Geschichte des Alevitentums sowohl im Osmanischen Reich, als auch in der Türkischen Republik, von Marginalisierung geprägt ist, haben die Gläubigen takiye praktiziert – das Verstecken des eigenen Glaubens zum Selbstschutz. Erst 1989 wurde takiye in Hamburg mit einer öffentlichen cem-Zeremonie gebrochen. Semah ist der Höhepunkt der Zeremonie, in der die Teilnehmer danach streben, die Einheit (birlik) mit Gott (hak) zu erlangen. Himmelsreisen vereint zwei Perspektiven auf den semah. Tuğçe ist eine junge Frau die mit ihrer Folklore Gruppe Bremen Hubyar Semahı Ekibi öffentlich auftritt, İskender ein älterer Herr aus einer Geistlichen-Familie, der seinen ersten semah noch im Dorf in Anatolien gegangen war. Beide geben persönliche Einblicke in ihr Erleben der alevitischen Ritualpraxis. Himmelsreisen zeigt anhand eines zentralen Elements des Alevitentums auch Interpretationen und Auslegungen des „Ritualtanzes" mit Bezug auf die Verortung in der deutschen Gesellschaft. Semah ist sein 2010 durch die UNESCO als Immaterielles Kulturelles Erbe der Menschheit anerkannt.
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Papers by Marcel Klapp, PhD
phenomenon, the paper drawson an ethnographic case study of SalafiInfluencer Abdurrashid, examining the specifi strategies he develops for his channels on YouTube and TikTok, the synergies he generates between them, and the active outreach measures through which he creates a gateway for his YouTube profile via TikTok in order to gain authority.
The contributions in this Special Issue address various aspects of hostile narratives and attempts at dealing with them or countering them. They discuss both theoretical and practical challenges of studying hate speech and other types of prejudiced discourses, along with educational initiatives and other forms of moral courage on the part of individuals (Osswald et al. 2012).
In the first contribution, Björn Technau adopts a pragmatic perspective to examine the structural and functional characteristics of slur terms. Taking group-based slurs with their complex semantics under scrutiny, Technau situates them in the context of hate speech, thus revisiting definitions of the latter and providing an overview of the results of previous research. Politicians, for example, as he points out, tend to avoid explicitly racist terms, appealing instead to voters’ latent racism. His analysis of the pejorative, non-pejorative and neutral uses of ethnic slur terms, including cases of appropriation, leads him to the conclusion that to get a clear, accurate and comprehensive picture of the pragmatics of slur terms we need “to account for individual differences in their frequencies of use, their modes of use, and their pragmatic effects”.
In the article that follows, KhosraviNik and Esposito also underline the importance of various contextual factors which need to be considered while studying online hate. These, they argue can be situated on three levels: the social, cultural, as well as digital participatory level, and thus require an interdisciplinary approach. The authors set out to explore the interface between the social media communication paradigm, along with affordances it is based on, and cyberhate. Approaching online communication from the Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) perspective they identify and discuss diverse ways (including a sense of anonymity and de-individuation) in which the participatory web enables and facilitates incivility and violent behavior online. Since the main focus here is on verbal aggression targeting women – online misogyny – KhosraviNik and Esposito examine its various forms, going beyond the phenomena of trolling and flaming, along with motivations behind it and its social implications.
Questions concerning gender and sexuality and how these two are discursively constructed within hegemonic heterosexuality and heteronormativity paradigms are the focus of Fabienne Baider’s contribution. Applying a Foucauldian approach to sexualities in her quantitative and qualitative analysis of online comments focused on the LGBT community, the author identifies a range of frames and topoi used to construct LGBT identities in the Greek Cypriot context. Arguments forming the basis of homophobic hate speech, she demonstrates, draw on the notions of safety and security, family values and morality, majority vs majority rules, and pathology, and form part of wider institutional discourses of social stability, national continuity, even the nation’s survival. Baider argues here for the link between nationalism and compulsory hegemonic heteronormativity and emphasises the socio-normative impact of the Orthodox Church, once again highlighting the need for a fully-fledged contextual analysis of hostile narratives, taking into account their historical, socio-political, and cultural embedding.
Jurate Ruzaite’s contribution sheds light on the role that corpus linguistic methods and tools may play in the identification of hate speech in public discourse. Such identification process, as she demonstrates, is fraught with challenges, for example the lack of bias indicators, different genre conventions, and language variation due to diachronic change. Her study of Lithuanian online comments, which involves the analysis of wordlists, collocations, and formulaic language with the AntConc software, allows for identification of dominant patterns in the representation of certain groups. Yet, it also shows that rather than being overtly manifested in lexis, aggression is often expressed indirectly through creative language use, thus requiring qualitative methods of analysis.
The following three contributions focus on various dimensions of anti-immigration sentiment and their discursive manifestations, in particular in the British context. Andreas Musolff examines hostile attitudes towards multilingualism and multiculturalism. His analysis of the press and forum data reveals that the presence of foreign languages in the British public sphere is perceived as a threat to the “home” culture and thus, for the most part, is evaluated negatively. Despite being moderated, the Internet forum becomes a powerful platform to legitimise anti-immigrant attitudes: individual narratives based on commenters’ supposedly negative experience act as powerful argumentative tools, appealing to the general public’s emotions and concerns. Additionally, as Musolff points out, such negative perception and representation of multilingualism and multiculturalism is both constituted by and constitutive for dominant media discourses on migration.
Monika Kopytowska and Paul Chilton’s paper discusses Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech and its reception 50 years later in view of the rising anti-immigration sentiment and Brexit campaign. The authors provide an overview of dominant themes in migration-related discourses, devoting particular attention to the threat construction process. Drawing on the insights from neuroscience and cognitive linguistics, they demonstrate how particular lexical expressions and discursive strategies can act as powerful triggers of fear and anxiety, and thus potentially influence the audience’s cognitive, affective, and behavioural responses (which, they show, had its manifestations in the Brexit referendum voting patterns). In their analysis of Enoch Powell’s speech and its contemporary social media rendition, the authors explore the mechanisms underlying the process of recontextualization and the role of this process in facilitating the spread of hostile and prejudiced discourses.
Katerina Strani and Anna Szczepaniak Kozak also focus on anti-immigrant discourse and patterns of representation it employs. Analysing texts from the UK and Polish media, along with data from interviews with migrants, the authors identify discursive strategies of othering and their potential impact on the groups concerned. Among the strategies used with the aim of categorising, denigrating, oppressing and ultimately rejecting the Other five strategies present in both British and Polish data are identified and discussed, namely: (1) stereotyping, (2) whiteness as the norm, (3) racialization, (4) objectification, and (5) wrongly ascribed ethnicity. The interview data also provides important insights into the application of the above strategies and their effects in real life situations in which foreigners are involved.
The last two contributions shed light on the educational dimension of hate speech prevention as well as practices related to anti-extremism and counter-radicalisation. Marcel Klapp’s paper discusses programs and measures against Islamist-extremist messages implemented by both governmental and non-governmental institutions in Germany. Highlighting the need for “decentralized, horizontal and ‘value-based’ forms of strategic communication” Klapp argues that the main purpose of such educational and awareness-raising activities should be to enable young people to properly understand and respond to the ideologically loaded, hostile and/or prejudiced content. The “Salam Online” educational material produced by Zentrum für Islamische Theologie Münster, which Klapp presents here, serves as an example of an approach to countering Islamist-extremist ideology through enhancing media literacy, critical thinking and promoting “social models of coherence and commonality”.
Jelena Vujić, Mirjana Daničić and Tamara Aralica address one more important aspect of mediating hostility in the public sphere, namely translators’ work. Having identified the linguistico-pragmatic features of hate speech present in presidential campaigns-related discourse in the USA and Serbia in 2016 and 2017, the authors discuss the results of the case study concerning translation exercises based on these hateful texts which were used to examine Serbian students’ attitudes towards ethically and morally challenging language contents in their mother tongue and in English. While the groups targeted and the strategies are similar, Vujić et al. observe that translators’ moral and ethical norms are stronger in the former case, which is likely to affect the translational output (in translators’ mother tongue). The article thus brings up important questions about the role of translators, corroborating Mona Baker’s (2006: 151) argument that translators and interpreters are not “detached unaccountable professionals whose involvement begins and ends with the delivery of a linguistic product […] Consciously or otherwise, they translate texts and utterances that participate in creating, negotiating and contesting social reality”.
The educational material ‘Salam Online’ which was developed and produced by staff and students of the religious education department of Zentrum für Islamische Theologie Münster will be presented as one approach to countering Islamist-extremist ideology through debunking, critical reading and the proposition of social models of coherence and commonality.
Teaching Documents by Marcel Klapp, PhD
Organization of Conferences and Workshops by Marcel Klapp, PhD
Die Fortbildung wird den Teilnehmenden Informationen und Anregungen geben, wie Schritte zu Prävention und Deradikalisierung eingeleitet werden können und welche Möglichkeiten es gibt, das Thema gewaltbereiter Salafismus im Unterricht zu thematisieren.
Film by Marcel Klapp, PhD
Winner International Film Festival for Spirituality, Visionary & Religion 2016, Indonesien.
Official Selection Turkish Film Festival 2016, Boston, USA.
Official Selection Equalitiy Festival 2016, Kiew, Ukraine.
Official Selection Christian Life International Film Festival 2017, Ontario, Kanada.
Official Selection What a Short Intl. Film Festival 2017, Delhi, Indien.
Official Selection Faith and Spirituality Short Film Festival (theaudienceawards.com), Online, USA.
Der Film Himmelsreisen gibt Einblicke in den „Ritualtanz” der Aleviten, einer Religionsgemeinschaft aus Anatolien. Während ihnen in ihrem Ursprungsland der Türkei bis heute die rechtliche Anerkennung vorenthalten wird, gelten sie in Deutschland seit 2007 offiziell als Religionsgemeinschaft nach dem Grundgesetz. Da die Geschichte des Alevitentums sowohl im Osmanischen Reich, als auch in der Türkischen Republik, von Marginalisierung geprägt ist, haben die Gläubigen takiye praktiziert – das Verstecken des eigenen Glaubens zum Selbstschutz. Erst 1989 wurde takiye in Hamburg mit einer öffentlichen cem-Zeremonie gebrochen. Semah ist der Höhepunkt der Zeremonie, in der die Teilnehmer danach streben, die Einheit (birlik) mit Gott (hak) zu erlangen. Himmelsreisen vereint zwei Perspektiven auf den semah. Tuğçe ist eine junge Frau die mit ihrer Folklore Gruppe Bremen Hubyar Semahı Ekibi öffentlich auftritt, İskender ein älterer Herr aus einer Geistlichen-Familie, der seinen ersten semah noch im Dorf in Anatolien gegangen war. Beide geben persönliche Einblicke in ihr Erleben der alevitischen Ritualpraxis. Himmelsreisen zeigt anhand eines zentralen Elements des Alevitentums auch Interpretationen und Auslegungen des „Ritualtanzes" mit Bezug auf die Verortung in der deutschen Gesellschaft. Semah ist sein 2010 durch die UNESCO als Immaterielles Kulturelles Erbe der Menschheit anerkannt.
phenomenon, the paper drawson an ethnographic case study of SalafiInfluencer Abdurrashid, examining the specifi strategies he develops for his channels on YouTube and TikTok, the synergies he generates between them, and the active outreach measures through which he creates a gateway for his YouTube profile via TikTok in order to gain authority.
The contributions in this Special Issue address various aspects of hostile narratives and attempts at dealing with them or countering them. They discuss both theoretical and practical challenges of studying hate speech and other types of prejudiced discourses, along with educational initiatives and other forms of moral courage on the part of individuals (Osswald et al. 2012).
In the first contribution, Björn Technau adopts a pragmatic perspective to examine the structural and functional characteristics of slur terms. Taking group-based slurs with their complex semantics under scrutiny, Technau situates them in the context of hate speech, thus revisiting definitions of the latter and providing an overview of the results of previous research. Politicians, for example, as he points out, tend to avoid explicitly racist terms, appealing instead to voters’ latent racism. His analysis of the pejorative, non-pejorative and neutral uses of ethnic slur terms, including cases of appropriation, leads him to the conclusion that to get a clear, accurate and comprehensive picture of the pragmatics of slur terms we need “to account for individual differences in their frequencies of use, their modes of use, and their pragmatic effects”.
In the article that follows, KhosraviNik and Esposito also underline the importance of various contextual factors which need to be considered while studying online hate. These, they argue can be situated on three levels: the social, cultural, as well as digital participatory level, and thus require an interdisciplinary approach. The authors set out to explore the interface between the social media communication paradigm, along with affordances it is based on, and cyberhate. Approaching online communication from the Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) perspective they identify and discuss diverse ways (including a sense of anonymity and de-individuation) in which the participatory web enables and facilitates incivility and violent behavior online. Since the main focus here is on verbal aggression targeting women – online misogyny – KhosraviNik and Esposito examine its various forms, going beyond the phenomena of trolling and flaming, along with motivations behind it and its social implications.
Questions concerning gender and sexuality and how these two are discursively constructed within hegemonic heterosexuality and heteronormativity paradigms are the focus of Fabienne Baider’s contribution. Applying a Foucauldian approach to sexualities in her quantitative and qualitative analysis of online comments focused on the LGBT community, the author identifies a range of frames and topoi used to construct LGBT identities in the Greek Cypriot context. Arguments forming the basis of homophobic hate speech, she demonstrates, draw on the notions of safety and security, family values and morality, majority vs majority rules, and pathology, and form part of wider institutional discourses of social stability, national continuity, even the nation’s survival. Baider argues here for the link between nationalism and compulsory hegemonic heteronormativity and emphasises the socio-normative impact of the Orthodox Church, once again highlighting the need for a fully-fledged contextual analysis of hostile narratives, taking into account their historical, socio-political, and cultural embedding.
Jurate Ruzaite’s contribution sheds light on the role that corpus linguistic methods and tools may play in the identification of hate speech in public discourse. Such identification process, as she demonstrates, is fraught with challenges, for example the lack of bias indicators, different genre conventions, and language variation due to diachronic change. Her study of Lithuanian online comments, which involves the analysis of wordlists, collocations, and formulaic language with the AntConc software, allows for identification of dominant patterns in the representation of certain groups. Yet, it also shows that rather than being overtly manifested in lexis, aggression is often expressed indirectly through creative language use, thus requiring qualitative methods of analysis.
The following three contributions focus on various dimensions of anti-immigration sentiment and their discursive manifestations, in particular in the British context. Andreas Musolff examines hostile attitudes towards multilingualism and multiculturalism. His analysis of the press and forum data reveals that the presence of foreign languages in the British public sphere is perceived as a threat to the “home” culture and thus, for the most part, is evaluated negatively. Despite being moderated, the Internet forum becomes a powerful platform to legitimise anti-immigrant attitudes: individual narratives based on commenters’ supposedly negative experience act as powerful argumentative tools, appealing to the general public’s emotions and concerns. Additionally, as Musolff points out, such negative perception and representation of multilingualism and multiculturalism is both constituted by and constitutive for dominant media discourses on migration.
Monika Kopytowska and Paul Chilton’s paper discusses Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech and its reception 50 years later in view of the rising anti-immigration sentiment and Brexit campaign. The authors provide an overview of dominant themes in migration-related discourses, devoting particular attention to the threat construction process. Drawing on the insights from neuroscience and cognitive linguistics, they demonstrate how particular lexical expressions and discursive strategies can act as powerful triggers of fear and anxiety, and thus potentially influence the audience’s cognitive, affective, and behavioural responses (which, they show, had its manifestations in the Brexit referendum voting patterns). In their analysis of Enoch Powell’s speech and its contemporary social media rendition, the authors explore the mechanisms underlying the process of recontextualization and the role of this process in facilitating the spread of hostile and prejudiced discourses.
Katerina Strani and Anna Szczepaniak Kozak also focus on anti-immigrant discourse and patterns of representation it employs. Analysing texts from the UK and Polish media, along with data from interviews with migrants, the authors identify discursive strategies of othering and their potential impact on the groups concerned. Among the strategies used with the aim of categorising, denigrating, oppressing and ultimately rejecting the Other five strategies present in both British and Polish data are identified and discussed, namely: (1) stereotyping, (2) whiteness as the norm, (3) racialization, (4) objectification, and (5) wrongly ascribed ethnicity. The interview data also provides important insights into the application of the above strategies and their effects in real life situations in which foreigners are involved.
The last two contributions shed light on the educational dimension of hate speech prevention as well as practices related to anti-extremism and counter-radicalisation. Marcel Klapp’s paper discusses programs and measures against Islamist-extremist messages implemented by both governmental and non-governmental institutions in Germany. Highlighting the need for “decentralized, horizontal and ‘value-based’ forms of strategic communication” Klapp argues that the main purpose of such educational and awareness-raising activities should be to enable young people to properly understand and respond to the ideologically loaded, hostile and/or prejudiced content. The “Salam Online” educational material produced by Zentrum für Islamische Theologie Münster, which Klapp presents here, serves as an example of an approach to countering Islamist-extremist ideology through enhancing media literacy, critical thinking and promoting “social models of coherence and commonality”.
Jelena Vujić, Mirjana Daničić and Tamara Aralica address one more important aspect of mediating hostility in the public sphere, namely translators’ work. Having identified the linguistico-pragmatic features of hate speech present in presidential campaigns-related discourse in the USA and Serbia in 2016 and 2017, the authors discuss the results of the case study concerning translation exercises based on these hateful texts which were used to examine Serbian students’ attitudes towards ethically and morally challenging language contents in their mother tongue and in English. While the groups targeted and the strategies are similar, Vujić et al. observe that translators’ moral and ethical norms are stronger in the former case, which is likely to affect the translational output (in translators’ mother tongue). The article thus brings up important questions about the role of translators, corroborating Mona Baker’s (2006: 151) argument that translators and interpreters are not “detached unaccountable professionals whose involvement begins and ends with the delivery of a linguistic product […] Consciously or otherwise, they translate texts and utterances that participate in creating, negotiating and contesting social reality”.
The educational material ‘Salam Online’ which was developed and produced by staff and students of the religious education department of Zentrum für Islamische Theologie Münster will be presented as one approach to countering Islamist-extremist ideology through debunking, critical reading and the proposition of social models of coherence and commonality.
Die Fortbildung wird den Teilnehmenden Informationen und Anregungen geben, wie Schritte zu Prävention und Deradikalisierung eingeleitet werden können und welche Möglichkeiten es gibt, das Thema gewaltbereiter Salafismus im Unterricht zu thematisieren.
Winner International Film Festival for Spirituality, Visionary & Religion 2016, Indonesien.
Official Selection Turkish Film Festival 2016, Boston, USA.
Official Selection Equalitiy Festival 2016, Kiew, Ukraine.
Official Selection Christian Life International Film Festival 2017, Ontario, Kanada.
Official Selection What a Short Intl. Film Festival 2017, Delhi, Indien.
Official Selection Faith and Spirituality Short Film Festival (theaudienceawards.com), Online, USA.
Der Film Himmelsreisen gibt Einblicke in den „Ritualtanz” der Aleviten, einer Religionsgemeinschaft aus Anatolien. Während ihnen in ihrem Ursprungsland der Türkei bis heute die rechtliche Anerkennung vorenthalten wird, gelten sie in Deutschland seit 2007 offiziell als Religionsgemeinschaft nach dem Grundgesetz. Da die Geschichte des Alevitentums sowohl im Osmanischen Reich, als auch in der Türkischen Republik, von Marginalisierung geprägt ist, haben die Gläubigen takiye praktiziert – das Verstecken des eigenen Glaubens zum Selbstschutz. Erst 1989 wurde takiye in Hamburg mit einer öffentlichen cem-Zeremonie gebrochen. Semah ist der Höhepunkt der Zeremonie, in der die Teilnehmer danach streben, die Einheit (birlik) mit Gott (hak) zu erlangen. Himmelsreisen vereint zwei Perspektiven auf den semah. Tuğçe ist eine junge Frau die mit ihrer Folklore Gruppe Bremen Hubyar Semahı Ekibi öffentlich auftritt, İskender ein älterer Herr aus einer Geistlichen-Familie, der seinen ersten semah noch im Dorf in Anatolien gegangen war. Beide geben persönliche Einblicke in ihr Erleben der alevitischen Ritualpraxis. Himmelsreisen zeigt anhand eines zentralen Elements des Alevitentums auch Interpretationen und Auslegungen des „Ritualtanzes" mit Bezug auf die Verortung in der deutschen Gesellschaft. Semah ist sein 2010 durch die UNESCO als Immaterielles Kulturelles Erbe der Menschheit anerkannt.