Time: 5.00-6.30pm
Date: Thursday 23 January 2025
Place: Shilling Lecture Theatre
The World White Web provides an interdisciplinary analysis of far-right radicalisation in the digital age, drawing from criminology, history, and computer science to explore how technology and imagery accelerate extremist recruitment. The book examines 20,000 internet memes to reveal white supremacy’s deep historical roots. It demonstrates how far-right propagandists leverage historical narratives and symbols to influence modern-day recruitment, bridging fringe and mainstream ideas across diverse time periods, countries and contexts, amid technological and social changes. Topics include racism and xenophobia in Greek and Roman antiquity, antisemitism in the Middle Ages, anti-Black racism rooted in the Antebellum South, the weaponisation of the Reconquista in Spain, the ‘memeification’ of the Rurik Dynasty in Russia, Crusader iconography in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, eco-fascist propaganda in the Balkans, neo-Nazi mythology in India, and Völkisch ideology in Germany and Austria. The book emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary, socio-technical and multi-stakeholder approaches to truly comprehend and address the contemporary manifestations and threats posed by the global interconnectedness of the far right online.
Bio: Dr Ashton Kingdon is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Southampton. She is also an Advisory Board Member at the Accelerationism Research Consortium, a research fellow at VOX-Pol, a core member of the Extremism and Gaming Research Network (EGRN), a member of the steering committee for the British Society of Criminology's Hate Crime Network and former head of Technology and Research Ethics at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right. Ashton Kingdon’s research is interdisciplinary, combining criminology, history, and computer science to explore the ways in which extremists utilise technology and imagery for recruitment and radicalisation. She has advised the UK, US, Canadian, New Zealand and Australian governments and law enforcement, military, United Nations, and social media companies as to the risks posed by extremists operating online. In addition to extremists’ use of technology to recruit and radicalise, her expertise also lies in analysing the relationship existing between terrorism and climate change.
Thanks to Akil Awan at the Conflict, Violence and Terrorism Research Centre (CVTRC) for organising this.