1. Untangling Political Challenges in the Mediterranean Basin and Europe
Summary
This project relies on innovative research methodology, including open-source, digital (or digitized) text and image analysis to study the politics of human rights and security in the Mediterranean basin and Europe. Based on several interactive, praxis-oriented workshops, the project introduces new, critical social research methods to capture and assess complex sociopolitical phenomena, such as political change and the immigration crisis. It is geared towards a wide range of international researchers in the humanities and social sciences, including participants from the US, Europe and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It aims at strengthening cross-regional and interdisciplinary collaboration and expanding the use of digital technology to underserved research communities.
PROJECTS INCLUDE:
State Power, Transitions & Resilience: The Securitization of Democracy in Egypt and Tunisia
By Dr. Arnaud Kurze
This research examines the issue of enhanced national security strategies in the Middle East and North Africa to counter growing threats of Islamic State against the backdrop of promoting democratic transition processes. Drawing from case studies of Tunisia and Egypt, this study analyzes state-society relations in the post-Arab Spring period. In both countries, civil society faces repressive legislation in the name of national security, a phenomenon also known securitization, which describes the process of state actors transforming subjects into matters of security. This begs the following question: why is the strategy of securitizing democratic transition processes detrimental to fostering stability and sustainable peace? Referring to the concept of resilience -- the act to recover quickly from difficulties, notably used in development studies with regards to natural disasters -- the author discusses the consequences of oppressive policies by Tunisian and Egyptian governments for civil society. Based on content analysis from online news media to examine official transition narratives in Egypt and Tunisia, the author finds that although these policies aim to control society by instilling fear within society, they also incite a polarization of various social actors.
Contentious Politics in the Digital Age: Youth Activism in Tunisia
By Cindy Reiff
Relying on SVEN, this research maps political dissent of pro-democracy youth activists in the context of the Arab Spring. Concentrating on activist goals and collective action, this study explores practices used to influence political change in Tunisia in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. The research focuses particularly on the use of Internet technologies and interactive media as these tools have gained importance in recent years and have spaces that allow marginalized youth to express their political opinions online. The author of the study argues that youth has carved out these new virtual spaces to promote contentious views due to the tightly controlled offline public sphere by the state. With the help of new research tools like SVEN the author analyzes publicly available data online, such as social media content, in order to trace trending topics among Tunisia’s cyber activists. In her findings, she assesses how political issues form in the cyberspace and to what extent these online discussion forums serve as a platform to mobilize collective action on the ground.
Mapping Tunisian Foreign Policy in the Post-Arab Spring
By Aymen Briki
This project employs the content analysis software SVEN to examine political change in foreign affairs based on the case study of Tunisia. While the Tunisian example is often cited as the only success story fostering democratic consolidation in the post-Arab Spring period, the transition process is filled with political challenges at the domestic and international level. This research builds on a conceptual framework that borrow from window-of-opportunity policy analysis to map changes in Tunisian foreign policy after the fall of dictator El Zine Ben Ali in 2011. For this, the author traces the historic development of Tunisian foreign affairs under both Presidents Habib Bourguiba and Ben Ali. The findings of digitized document analysis with SVEN underline that under Bourguiba, Tunisia was pursuing a pragmatic foreign policy in a bipolar word. Under President Ben Ali, Tunisia’s diplomatic efforts could best be described as economic diplomacy with Western allies serving as buffers. The evaluation SVEN results of current efforts to define a Tunisian way across the Mediterranean basin show that the Tunisian state is search of a new identity and role within a newly emerging Arab context.
The Securitization Process of Syrian Refugees in the Dutch Social Media Discourse
By Dr. Chris Lamont and Linda Piersma
Based on SVEN, this research analyzes the Dutch social media discourse on the Syrian refugee crisis. The Copenhagen School made an important contribution to the field of international relations and security studies by introducing the framework of securitization. However, the focus within this framework on central texts and elite actors as well as on the emergency policy rather than the inter-subjective construction process can be considered increasingly untenable. Especially in the light of the widespread use of social media, the static idea of securitization being a one-dimensional relationship flowing from a political actor to a receptive public is no longer adequate to be able to understand the complexity of securitization. Social and political issues are increasingly discussed online, which broadened the securitization process, involving a growing number of individuals and social groups using the Internet. In order to understand these online processes, this research concentrates on the securitization process of Syrian refugees in the Dutch social media discourse. Drawing on several hundred comments on news feeds on Facebook the author analyzes discursive patterns by using predication, presupposition and subject positioning as formulated by Roxanne Lynn Doty. The author finds that the securitization process within social media discourse is highly complex and diverse. Securitization can thus no longer be understood solely by studying elite actors and their securitizing moves.
Moro: The Evolution of an Epithet in Spanish Public Discourse
By Dr. Maisa Taha
This project uses SVEN to examine the evolving semiosis of moro, or Moor, in contemporary Spain. Ostensibly a reference to the North African Muslims who reigned in Al-Andalus (711-1492), moro also carries with it a history of semantic derogation, having been incorporated into popular Castilian idioms such as, ¡Hay moros en la costa! (“There are Moors on the coast!” i.e., “Danger! Be careful!”). Such figurative association of moro with fear or threats to wellbeing and safety has been discussed as a linguistic index of Spanish national identity—as decidedly Catholic and European—as well as rejection of new Moroccan and Muslim immigrant populations. At the same time, there is evidence that moro is being appropriated, particularly by Moroccan immigrant youth, and revalorized as a token of positive identity. This research plumbs online media and social networking fora to identify both strands of meaning: the common tropes of negativity, which racialize Muslims, and emerging positive appropriations by speakers who themselves identify as Muslim, North African, or even moro. This study speaks to the ever-changing nature of language. It also speaks to how those with marginalized identities use language as a tool to assert legitimacy in their everyday lives.
Ontological and Constructional Approach to the Discourse Analysis of the Commemorative Speeches in Croatia
By Dr. Benedikt Perak
This study deals with the commemoration rituals as communication practices and conceptualization mechanisms. Particularly, the study analyses commemoration speeches delivered at the seven commemoration sites monitored by the FRAMNAT project from January 2014 to December 2016 . The transcription of the speeches enabled the creation of the FRAMNAT 2014 - 2016 corpus and the cultural cognitive discourse analysis of the texts. The speeches are seen as a network of conceptualizations about the referential historical events in Croatian cultural memory , construed with the function to reinforce a range of bio - psycho - social phenomena in the commemoration participants . The corpus analysis measured the frequency of the activated concepts in speeches by speakers and institutions. By using the graph theory algorithms on the level of lexical concepts we classified 64 speakers and 18 supporting institutions according to the 3370 invoked noun concepts at the commemoration s . The classification process has revealed distinct communities of speakers and their shared choice of salient concepts and strategies of framing the affective dispositions and cognitive processes that form the basis for construction of group identities, interaction and communication practices, political agenda and dominant cultural model of national identity in general.
2. Language, Social Media & Discourse
Harvesting Speech Datasets for Linguistic Research on the Web
By Jonathan Howell
Distinctions of prosody (rhythm, stress, and intonation) are ubiquitous in spoken language. It often seems obvious to a native speakers of English what prosody is most appropriate in a given sentence and context, and researchers in Linguistics and related fields have proposed numerous formalized hypotheses about it. But establishing the validity of these hypotheses is remarkably elusive. Much of the problem is that it is difficult to observe enough naturally-occurring examples of a given phenomenon to evaluate hypotheses. This project addresses this problem by “harvesting” examples of specific word sequences or word patterns from recently created web sources: podcasts and videos with text transcriptions obtained by automatic speech recognition (e.g. Audiosear.ch, YouTube closed captioning). It is possible to find hundreds or thousands of examples of people using the very same word pattern. By collecting these into a dataset, we can evaluate theories about the form and meaning of prosody on an unprecedented scale. Scaling up available data can be expected to have a transformative effect on our understanding of prosody. Prosody and intonation play an important role in making the discourse coherent, in signaling what part of the communicated information is foregrounded and backgrounded, and disambiguating speaker intention. Any advancement in understanding prosody not only deepens our understanding of the human language capability, it also has implications in a wide range of areas, including language instruction, translation studies, speech therapy, improving comprehensibility of synthesized speech, and improving speech recognition systems.