Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right

By Catherine Tebaldi

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This book explores the link between education, gender, and far-right metapolitics, and offers insights into the ways in which it circulates and is normalized. Through digital ethnography and fieldwork it explores the production, circulation, and interpretation of these discourses and the ideologies they express, tracing their movement across four groups of women in the US and UK – fascists, white nationalist, Christian nationalists, and Republicans. Although often understood to be opposed to education, the far-right is instead opposed to schooling – and offers its own practices of alt-education. Through media, alternative schools and home education, the far-right teaches their ideologies of gender and race, knowledge, and power, as well as transmitting alternative histories, sociologies, and conspiracies. From mom’s groups to digital discourses about the evils of public schools, social media are key arenas in which women not only teach, but are taught, far-right alternative knowledge. Alt-education teaches reactionary ideology as a timeless truth, normalizing it through discourses of home, family and love. At the same time, alt-education borrows and co-opts the language of critique – normalizing racism, sexism and fascism a kind of alternative knowledge, while making it exciting as a countercultural critique of “woke” liberal indoctrination. The book concludes with a look at this attempt to “speak post-truth to power” as a way of normalizing and spreading their ideology – bringing alt-education to a wide audience as their critiques of “woke” politics spreads across the US, UK, and into Europe.

People involved: Catherine Tebaldi

The LLMs4EU project aims to preserve European linguistic and cultural diversity in the digital age through cooperation between economic and academic actors. Indeed, some European languages are threatened to be left aside from generative Al development due to the lack of resources to train language models. Furthermore, the project intends to bring together some of Europe’s leading players in the field of generative Al to ensure that European companies and especially SMEs have access to the tools and resources to become competitive regarding language technologies and especially Large Language Models (LLMs). The project focuses on five application domains: energy, telecom, tourism, public services, and science.

The project is linked to The Alliance for Language Technologies (ALT-EDIC), a European Digital Infrastructure Consortium supporting the development of Language Technologies. It will promote excellence in language technologies and contribute to the preservation of Europe’s linguistic diversity and cultural richness. Luxembourg is represented in the ALT-EDIC is represented by The Culture & Computation Lab, in collaboration with the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST) and the Zenter fir d’Lëtzebuerger Sprooch (ZLS).

People involved: Christoph Purschke, Alistair Plum

As part of the Cuco Lab Conversations talk series, we invite international and local researchers from a variety of disicplinary backgrounds to present their work to the researchers and students of the department. The talks will cover the lab’s core topics, primarily mixed-methods approaches, theoretical considerations of digitality and the world we live in, NLP for small languages, and critical examinations of digital practices, e.g. online extremism and conspiracy theories. In addition, we specifically invite colleagues whose expertise is relevant to the researchers at the department. The lecture series takes place every semester during the lecture period, on Thursday from 16:00 to 17:00. All lectures are also streamed via Webex.

Lux-ASR is an automatic speech recognition system developed by the University of Luxembourg specifically for the Luxembourgish language, which is considered a low-resource language with approximately 390,000 native speakers. The project addresses the significant challenge of building ASR systems for languages with limited digital resources by utilizing two main algorithms: Facebook’s wav2vec 2.0 and OpenAI’s Whisper, with Whisper ultimately delivering superior performance. The researchers compiled a training dataset of approximately 90 hours of Luxembourgish speech from various sources including parliamentary debates and public media, then fine-tuned both models to achieve word error rates ranging between 10-13%. The system can handle multilingual speech recognition, particularly switches between Luxembourgish and French, which is crucial given Luxembourg’s multilingual speech community. Lux-ASR is freely available for testing through online demonstration systems and is supported by the Chamber of Deputies of Luxembourg, with ongoing development aimed at improving recognition accuracy and expanding the training dataset.

People involved: Peter Gilles

Advances in Sociolinguistics, Bloomsbury

Edited by Catherine Tebaldi, Alistair Plum & Christoph Purschke

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From anti-vaccine politics to aliens, this volume explores diverse critical approaches to conspiracy narratives representing them as playful stories with serious ideologies and effects.

It examines conspiracy in relation to social power and authority, moving beyond either disinformation or revelation. It looks at how the genre of conspiracy is the performance of questioning authority to produce new forms of expertise which frequently stabilize existing power hierarchies.

Across three parts, the book theorizes how conspiracy narratives are told, what they do in the social world, and how they circulate these social meanings. The first section offers semiotic and narrative analyses of the language of conspiracy as a genre. The second part examines the social effects of these narratives, arguing that elite conspiracy is a means to stabilize social power, looking in particular at gender-related conspiracies around feminism, abortion and trans rights. The third section considers the circulation of conspiracies and the ideologies they narrate, using unique mixed methods approaches to look at multilingual data in sites and communities in Brazil, Germany, Luxembourg, Russia and the USA.

People involved: Catherine Tebaldi, Alistair Plum, Christoph Purschke

Berkeley Journal of Right-Wing Studies 2(2), 2024, special issue

Edited by Catherine Tebaldi & Scott Burnett

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Why focus on language when we discuss gender and sexuality? And what do these things have to do with the far right? From catholic football players waxing poetic on feminine submission, to J. D. Vance’s hatred of cat ladies, Hulk Hogan’s striptease at the Republican Convention, or Senator Josh Hawley’s book Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs to Tucker Carlson’s brave reporting from the heart of the “war on men," the contemporary right is united in what it sees as a heroic discursive defense of “traditional" sexuality and gender.

The six papers and two commentaries in this special issue, from scholars in Luxembourg, Germany the US, Brazil, Japan, and Sweden, offer analyses of the role of digital media in reactionary gender politics around the world from Japanese anti-masturbation activists to Swedish family-values fascists, Polish propagandists and American lonely post-heroic pepe the frogs. Each paper uses close linguistic analysis to understand the social and highly mediatized construction of gender, and the social consequences of its naturalization and enforcement. We end with two commentaries, the first by Janet McIntosh exploring the role of the digital ‘manosphere’ and essentialist discourse in contemporary politics one by Tommaso Milani which highlights the core questions of the special issue “why everybody wants to be a fascist and why we should study language to understand it”.

People involved: Catherine Tebaldi

Language and Gender 17(1), 2023

Edited by Catherine Tebaldi & Dominika Baran

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The articles in this special issue on nationalism and anti-gender registers, explore highly mediatized, digitalized, and globally circulating discourse of “anti-genderism” as a political tool for the global right. It looks at in four cases: online ’tradwives’ or traditional wives defending national and sexual purity (Tebaldi), homonationalism in Islamophobic comments in the online forum r/thedonald (Brotherton), the natalist chronopolitics of Bolsonaro in Brazil (Silva and Dziuba) and the invocation of the spectre of gender to place Poland at the centre of the white West (Baran). Together, they highlight the role of digital media in the global circulation of anti-gender registers, and how this register shapes morally marked figures of ideal national women and men which are defined by tradition, sexuality, temporality and place. Anti-genderism is not just a call for ’traditional’ gender or marriage, but the evocation of a gendered nation, an idealised past and a strong future populated with warriors and mothers.

People involved: Catherine Tebaldi

In recent years Luxembourgish has gotten a lot of attention. Its special role in the complex multilingualism of Luxembourg has caused heated debates in the media. At the same time, people have started to use Luxembourgish as a written language only recently, largely through social and digital media. Both developments are at the center of the project TRAVOLTA. Using digital texts from RTL.lu, the project takes a close look at how Luxembourgish develops into a fully fledged standard language in real time. Additionally, it analyses central topics in the public discussion about multilingualism by investigating the opinions expressed in user comments to news articles. In doing so, the project harnesses advanced methods from machine learning to describe the dynamics of public discourse and the central role of Luxembourgish in this regard.

Funded by: Fonds national de la recherche (FNR)

DHUM people involved: Christoph Purschke, Anne-Marie Lutgen, Emilia Milano, Alistair Plum, Peter Gilles

External partners: Barbara Plank (LMU), Dirk Hovy (Bocconi), Stef Grondelaers (Meertens Instituut)

The Lingscape project documents and analyses the variability and perception of public signage using a free mobile research application. Individuals and groups can join the project to conduct their own research and to contribute to the collaborative data collection. In doing so, the project combines a citizen-science approach, that is, the active involvement of participants in all aspects of project work, with an innovative approach to the study of social dynamics, namely the study of linguistic landscapes.

The Lingscape project can thus not only serve as an analytical lens for the sociocultural dynamics of present-day societies. It also provides educational resources for the teaching of cultural diversity in schools and fosters the conscious interaction with language in public and its social significance.

DHUM people involved: Christoph Purschke, Jacques Spedener, Peter Gilles

The Schnëssen project is the first to comprehensively document and analyse variation in present-day Luxembourgish. It uses a free mobile research app for Android and iOS to collect recordings of spoken Luxembourgish covering more than 500 different topics. Participants can take part in different tasks such as translating German/French sentences into Luxembourgish, picture naming or answering sociolinguistic questionnaires to document their personal language use and attitudes. Until now, data from more than 1,000 speakers have been collected, providing 240,000 single recordings.

DHUM people involved: Peter Gilles, Christoph Purschke

Former associates: Nathalie Entringer, Sara Martin

TOPAS is an informal theory circle at the FHSE in which scholars from various disciplines come together to discuss theoretical perspectives from different disciplines and make them fruitful in terms of scholarly analysis. In doing so, we draw from the entire range of humanistic approaches to describing the lifeworld, with an emphasis on anthropological, culture-theoretical, philosophical, and sociological concepts. Of particular interest are questions about the connection between sociality, digitality, political organization, and power structures, but also positions on recognition theory and the questioning of established (“Western”) modes of scientific knowledge production.

DHUM people involved: Christoph Purschke, Harry Lehmann Johannes Pause, Stefan Börnchen, Till Dembeck

People from other UL entities: Judith Tröndle

Former members: Ulla Connor, † Adrian de Silva, Sébastian Thiltges

spellux is a Python package developed for the automatic correction and pre-processing of Luxembourgish text data. It integrates with the well-known spaCy for text processing and allows different processing operations, such as orthographic correction, lemmatization, and stemming. In its current form, the package is still in development mode.

For further info, check the repository site on Github.

People involved: Christoph Purschke