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VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Guest Lecture Series, Autumn 2023

Name: Dr Joe Whittaker

Title: Catch 22: Researcher Welfare and Institutional Ethics within Online Terrorism and Extremism Research

Outline: “Recent years have seen an increase in concern over the welfare of researchers who regularly engage with extremist and terrorist content online. This comprises external (such as death threats, doxing, and trolling), internal (psychological issues surrounding engagement with content), and professional issues. This lecture focuses on an important and understudied aspect of the issue of researcher welfare; the navigation of ethics committees. Drawing on interview-based research with 39 academics, Joe will discuss researchers’ experiences with the ethical application process; how and whether researcher welfare is considered; and the concern that institutions will make it more difficult to conduct research in future. These issues leave online extremism researchers in a “Catch 22” in which they either have little institutional oversight but experience harms conducting their work, or do have oversight, but with more barriers put up.”

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

Incels are a sub-culture community of men who forge a sense of identity around their perceived inability to form sexual or romantic relationships. In recent years, there has been a small, but growing, number of violent attacks that have been attributed to individuals who identify as incels. The purpose of this study was to use a large sample of incels from the UK and US to establish (a) their demographic make-up; (b) the consistency of their attitudes and beliefs; (c) their adherence to a common world view, (d) how they network with other incels; (e) whether there are cross-cultural differences between incels from the UK and US in the above; and finally, whether there is a predictive relationship between incel mental health, networking and ideology and the extent of their harmful attitudes and beliefs.