Online Library

VOX-Pol Guest Lecture Series, Autumn 2023

Name: Jonathan Collins

Title: An Introduction to Netnography & Step-by-step Guide

Outline: “New immersive methodologies are needed to better understand online extremist communities. The presentation will cover one of these (Netnography), providing an essential glimpse into this multifunctional tool and the benefits it offers to the field. The lecture will also include a step-by-step guide on how to conduct a netnographic study, offering a great starting point for those looking to adopt the technique.”

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 Guest Lecture Series, Autumn 2023

Name: Dr Anthony Richards

Title: Conceptualising Terrorism: Challenges and Implications

Outline: “Why is it important to generate an agreed definition of terrorism? What are the challenges that confront this and to what the extent can we view terrorism as an analytically distinctive concept?”

VOX-Pol Guest Lecture Series, Spring 2023

Speaker: Dr. Erin Saltman

Title: Cross-Platform Approaches to Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism Online

Outline: This presentation reviews advances in cross-platform solutions advanced through the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT). GIFCT was founded in 2017 by technology platforms to give structure and support for countering terrorism and violent extremism online. This includes workstreams for (1) multi stakeholder knowledge-sharing, (2) developing action-oriented research, (3) building cross-platform tech solutions, and (4) managing shared incident response protocols. The presentation reviews the state of play in adversarial shifts by violent extremist groups online and what this means for the evolution of counter measures in the online space. It is followed up by a Q&A covering topics such as transparency, the technical aspects of the Hash Sharing Database, and the ethics of funding.

VOX-Pol Guest Lecture Series, Spring 2024: Data Collection in Online Terrorism and Extremism Research

There has been a growing interest among researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to analyze the online activities of extremists and terrorists. As studies in this research area have increased, various data collection techniques have emerged to address key research questions, ranging from manual extraction to computational tools to collect online information. This lecture examines the strengths and limitations of commonly used data collection methods in online terrorism and extremism research. We draw from our research experiences and highlight ethical dilemmas with collection methods in practice. We then set forth suggestions for progressing research in this space. For more information on data collection in online terrorism and extremism research, see our recent article in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism as part of a special issue on the strengths and struggles of different methods of research on radicalization, extremism, and terrorism: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2024.2361957?src=exp-la

Ryan Scrivens is an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. He is also an Associate Director at the International CyberCrime Research Centre at Simon Fraser University and a Research Fellow at the VOX-Pol Network of Excellence. He is the recipient of the 2022 Early Career Impact Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Terrorism and Bias Crimes.

Steven Chermak is a Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. He is the co-creator of several databases including the Extremist Crime Database (ECDB), the Extremist Cybercrime Database (ECCD), and The American School Shooting Study (TASSS). He is the recipient of the 2021 Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Terrorism and Bias Crimes.

VOX-Pol Guest Lecture Series, Autumn 2023

Name: Dr. Saimum Parvez

Title: Digital Media and Narrowcasting: How Bangladeshi Violent Extremists Target Women and Youth for Recruitment

Outline: This presentation discusses the role of digital media in recruitment and how it helps recruits and recruiters discover each other. In Bangladesh, digital media have provided opportunities for violent extremists to reach previously unreachable demographics, such as women and youths from ‘westernized’ and well-off backgrounds. Saimum Parvez, Ph.D., is a MSCA-IMPACT cofund post-doctoral fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). This research project is co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 101034352.