OSMO Speaker Series: Dr Julia Ebner on "Language, Images and the Early Detection of Political Violence: From Terrorists to Tyrants"
- Date & time
- –
- Speaker
- Dr Julia Ebner
- Host
- Politics & Int Relations (Department)
- Series
- Sophia Knight
- Location
- Radcliffe Science Library - Seminar Room, Seminar Room, Radcliffe Science Library, off Parks Road, Oxford, Oxfordshire, OX1 3QP, United Kingdom
- Organisation
- Oxford
Topics
About this talk
Join us at the Oxford Social Media Observatory (OSMO) for the fourth in our weekly visiting speaker series! Abstract: Do violent actors give away their intentions in what they say and how they communicate? This talk brings together several strands of research on the language and, increasingly, imagery of terrorists, violent extremists and authoritarian leaders. It presents a psycholinguistic framework for identifying socio-psychological risk factors of violence in terrorist manifestos and online communications, including identity fusion, perceived outgroup threat, outgroup othering and violence-condoning norms. It then turns to an analysis of over two million words of primary-source material from 100 authoritarian leaders, using computational methods to examine whether similar psychological markers are detectable in leaders’ language and associated with different forms and scales of violence. Finally, the talk explores potential visual markers for early warning and considers the broader methodological challenge of applying computational approaches across actors, languages, platforms, historical periods and communication genres. If you have any questions, please contact myself Sophia Knight, Doctoral Researcher at OSMO (sophia.knight@reuben.ox.ac.uk), or Dr Andreu Casas, Director of OSMO (andreu.casas@politics.ox.ac.uk).
Add to Calendar