Everyday extremism in liminal online spaces

Jullietta presents her work on extremism and our own new associate professor Leonardo Da Costa Custodio is the reader and commentator. The text will be circulated a week before the seminar.

Researcher bio

Jullietta Stoencheva is a doctoral candidate in Media and Communication Studies at Malmö University. Combining computational and qualitative methods, her doctoral project analyses how platform affordances mediate the proliferation of extremist narratives in everyday digital interactions in Bulgaria and Sweden.

Practicalities

The seminar is hybrid and starts 14.00 (note the unusual time!).

Join us on Zoom (63730640545, password: K3)

Abstract

This thesis explores the circulation and normalisation of extremist narratives in everyday online interactions, focusing on liminal online spaces: anonymous, minimally moderated platforms positioned between fringe and mainstream environments. It argues that while often socially imagined as innocuous or peripheral, these spaces provide infrastructures where exclusionary narratives can circulate with limited scrutiny. Conceptually, the thesis draws on and further develops the notion of everyday extremism: the recurrent, routinised and normalised presence of extremist narratives embedded within mainstream spaces and public discourse. These dynamics are analysed by drawing on social identity theory and an affordance-focused approach.

Empirically, this is a compilation thesis comprising four studies. It adopts a mixed-methods, multi-case design across Sweden and Bulgaria. Computational techniques utilise large language models to identify patterns and ‘hot spots’ for qualitative analysis of discourses and narratives. The findings show that extremist narratives in liminal online spaces are embedded in mundane topics and conversational styles, sustained through repetition, and shaped by platform affordances such as anonymity and persistence. These dynamics render exclusionary meanings familiar by incorporating local specificities while maintaining transnational ideological patterns. By foregrounding liminal platforms, the thesis challenges dominant assumptions in extremism research and demonstrates how the mainstreaming of extremist ideas is driven not only by strategic actors, but also by ordinary users’ everyday communicative practices.

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