FACULTY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY | Lecture
Professorial lecture – Tina Askanius

Welcome to Tina Askanius' professorial lecture!

Tina Askanius gives her professorial lecture titled "Media, movements and democratic futures".

The lecture offers insights into contemporary academic debates on media, technological development and social and political movements, based on previous and ongoing research in the field.

What are some of the key developments in how digital media have enabled new forms of activism and political engagement over the past decades, but also given rise to online extremism, disinformation, and conspiracy theories fueling reactionary, anti-democratic movements around the world?

Providing empirical evidence from studies examining the role of media in a broad range of political movements, the talk spans issues such as social justice activism, climate change mobilizations and gender justice in the #MeToo movement to the weaponization of social media in the resurgence of white supremacist ideology and the mainstreaming of far-right extremism across liberal democracies.

Drawing on the findings from two ongoing projects on the circulation of far-right extremism, and its intersections with new forms of online misogyny and anti-feminism, I propose the notion of "everyday extremism" as a way of reflecting on the mainstreaming of exclusionary, stigmatizing and violent discourse in citizens' everyday lives online. The talk delves into how violent ideas make their way into public discourse and mainstream online spaces by travelling under the guise of irony and ‘edgy’ jokes in memes and other online ephemera, or as messages laced onto seemingly innocuous and mundane cultural artefacts circulated and sold online.

In closing, the implications of these developments as potential threats to democracy, its stability and sustainability are adressed, and the need for a new transdisciplinary research agenda for imagining and enabling democratic futures in a digital age.