Welcome to Volume 13, Issue 8 of the monthly VOX-Pol Newsletter
Back to the Classroom: VOX-Pol Resources to Support Your Teaching and Student Learning
With the new academic year getting underway shortly, we wanted to draw attention to some of the VOX-Pol resources available to support your teaching and student learning and research on online extremism and terrorism.
The VOX-Pol Lecture Series provides access to expert presentations and discussions featuring leading scholars and practitioners working across our sub-field. These lectures, which can be embedded in online learning environments (e.g., Blackboard, Moodle) can offer valuable supplementary material for modules, seminars, and student assignments.
For timely short-form analysis, our Blog offers regular commentary on emerging developments alongside a substantial archive of posts that can provide useful material for teaching and student discussion. Also available are our 25+ open access reports, which provide accessible, in-depth research on key developments and issues relating to online extremism, and can be used as supplementary reading or as starting points for classroom discussion and student research.
Finally, VOX-Pol’s Online Library collates a wide range of research and teaching materials, including journal articles, books, book chapters, reports and other publications into a fully searchable database. It provides a useful starting point for lecturers developing reading lists and for students exploring topics for essays, dissertations, and further research.
Whether you are preparing a new module, updating a reading list, or looking for resources to stimulate in-class discussion, VOX-Pol has useful resources for the academic year ahead.
VOX-Pol Member Publications
J.M. Berger explores how measuring public opinion—whether through polling, traditional media, or social metrics—inevitably alters perceived consensus in ‘The Observer Effect in Social Construction‘ published on Medium. He demonstrates how low digital publishing costs and audience fragmentation amplify these distortions, making niche and fringe viewpoints feel far more mainstream.
The University of Manchester and VOX-Pol’s Allysa Czerwinsky has two recent publications. Allysa contributed Chapter 42, ‘On the Outside, Always Lurking In: A Reflexive Account of Researching Misogynistic Incel Forums,’ to the second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Violence. And her post ‘From the Ground Up: Citizen-Led Counterspeech Against Male Supremacism on Reddit‘ appeared last week on the GNET blog.
LMU and VOX-Pol’s Heidi Schulze, together with colleagues Jan Rau, Nils Jungmann, Moritz Fürneisen, Gregor Wiedemann, and Pascal Siegers, co-authored ‘A Community Data Trustee for Sensitive Data Sharing in Far-Right Online Research,’ which appears in the current issue of the open access Media and Communication journal.
Finally, for this month, DCU’s James Fitzgerald, together with Rio De Janeiro NetLab colleagues Carlos Eduardo Barros, Débora Salles, and Rose Marie Santini, authored an article titled ‘Brazil’s Supreme Court on Content Moderation: National Sovereignty Versus Tech Oligarchy‘ that was published in Science as Culture.
On The VOX-Pol Blog
Recently published on the VOX-Pol Blog:
- Sarah Stevenson & Dr Steven Barracosa, ‘Developmental pathways away from extremism: A model of family-based intervention in youth CVE practice‘, July 15.
- Moses Ameh, ‘From Public Commentary to Digital Polarisation: Online Narrative Escalation and Identity-Based Framing in Nigeria’s Social Media Sphere‘, July 22.
- Marten Risius and Christopher David, ‘Hollow‑Earth myths and Nazi UFOs on TikTok are bringing white supremacism into the mainstream‘, July 29.
Are you interested in publishing a VOX-Pol Blog post? Read our Blog submission instructions here.
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