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VOX-Pol Blog post.

Researchers of risky topics have benefitted from a burgeoning literature on researcher safety, including that specifically focused on researching the far right. Much of this literature has focused on tackling urgent concerns and providing practical advice, targeting the individual and the institution. Drawing on 21 interviews with researchers of the far right and manosphere, this report complements these efforts by detailing how researcher safety is impacted by environmental factors. Focusing on three key stakeholders – the institution, the manager and the researcher themselves – the report illustrates how individual efforts and interactions between stakeholders have significant implications for safety and underlines the need to situate researchers within the academic context.

Arguing that barriers to safety pivot on both what is known about risk and what is possible to mitigate, the report highlights areas to focus on to improve both current and future practice. To examine the impact of stakeholders and how their interactions have an impact on safety, this report proposes a matrix highlighting the varying roles, responsibilities and capabilities of each actor. In doing so, it illustrates the necessity of understanding the researcher within a broader framework rather than focusing on the researcher in isolation. These findings contribute to concerns about the ability of researchers to safeguard themselves, and the importance of environmental factors in affecting the safety of researchers. Although focused on researchers of the far right, the findings are likely applicable to researchers of extremism more broadly, who face similar harms in the same environment.