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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Mobilizing against the Other : cyberhate, refugee crisis and proximization

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Drawing on the insights from Media Proximization Approach (MPA), the present chapter explores the dynamics of the online construction of the Other in the context of current refugee crisis and the phenomenon of hate speech within cyberspace. While content- and theme-wise, it takes under scrutiny online refugee-related discourses, on the theoretical and methodological level it presents a new approach to mediated construction of social reality based on the notion of distance and Self/Other or Us/Them dichotomy. Coached within (Cognitive) Critical Discourse Analysis, such an approach calls for an integration of corpus linguistics methods and tools. The chapter addresses the following questions: (1) How do the structural and functional features of online communication facilitate the spread of hateful and radical messages? (2) What is the perception of hate speech targeted at refugees and immigrants among Polish people (aged 18–35)? (3) What are the recurrent linguistic means, as well as the underlying cognitive and discursive mechanisms, of representing refugees as the Other? (4) How are salience and conceptualisation, related to representation of the Other and proximization strategies, manifested in keywords and word co-occurrence patterns? (5) What is the interface between othering and hate speech? Some of the findings presented in this chapter are based on the analyses conducted within the European project C.O.N.T.A.C.T., which focuses on exploration of various aspects of hate speech and hate crime in ten EU countries.