By Henry Tuck, Jakob Guhl, Julia Smirnova, Lea Gerster and Oliver Marsh

Harmful actors use an ever-expanding range of digital spaces to spread harmful ideologies and undermine human rights and democracy online. Understanding their evolving ideas, online networks and activities is critical to developing a more comprehensive evidence base to inform effective and proportional efforts to counter them. But creating that evidence base can challenge the technical capabilities, resources, and even ethical and legal boundaries of research. We are concerned that all these may be getting worse, just as the options for spreading harm online increase. It should therefore be of concern that in many instances it is increasingly hard to conduct digital research in a systematic, ethical and legal manner. This results in a situation where difficult trade offs have to be made between competing goods, including the desire to understand and mitigate harmful content and behaviour online, the preservation of privacy and the adherence to legal agreements. We argue in this report that this does not need to be the case; solutions are available,…

Beirut; Berlin; London; Paris; Washington DC : Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), 2023. 60p.

By Ciarán O’Connor

This report aims to provide an in-depth analysis on the state of extremism and hate on TikTok. It is the culmination of three months of research on a sample of 1,030 videos, equivalent to just over eight hours of content, posted on the social media platform. These videos were used to promote hatred, as well as glorify extremism and terrorism. ISD set out to examine the state of hate and extremism on TikTok in two ways. The first objective involved analysing how individuals or groups promote hateful ideologies and target people on the platform based on numerous protected attributes such as ethnicity, religion, gender or others. Second, using the same framework, ISD investigated how features on TikTok like profiles, hashtags, share functions, video effects and music are used to spread hate. This report seeks to start a conversation around how platforms like TikTok can improve their own practices to protect users from harm. Additionally, it underscores the clear need for independent oversight of such platforms, which currently leave users and the wider public open to significant risks to their health, security and rights.

Beirut; Berlin; London; Paris; Washington DC : Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), 2021. 57p.

By Ciarán O’Connor

In collaboration with the Southern Poverty Law Center, ISD conducted research to examine the use and misuse of YouTube Super Chats, a tool that allows creators to monetise comments in their livestream chat feeds, that are an increasingly important source of revenue for both YouTube and creators on the platform. The report features three case studies examining popular political commentary and content channels; Timcast IRL, The Young Turks and Right Side Broadcasting Network. In the past, Super Chats have been used by extremists on the platform as a source of generating revenue and, as this report demonstrates, Super Chats continue to enable creators and YouTube to profit from comments that promote violence, conspiracy theories, misinformation and hate. The report features three case studies of popular YouTube highlights YouTube’s failure to effectively enforce its own community guidelines on Super Chats and includes recommendations on how the platform can address this enforcement gap.

Beirut; Berlin; London; Paris; Washington DC : Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), 2022. 18p.

Compiled by Charles Mackay

A rare collection of English poems. Extensive topic index, including an index of first lines of all poems.

London. George Routledge & Sons. 1869. 614p.

By Amy Sodaro 

Through a global comparative approach, Amy Sodaro uses in-depth case studies of five exemplary memorial museums that commemorate a range of violent pasts and allow for a chronological and global examination of the form: the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC; the House of Terror in Budapest; the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda; the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile; and the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York. Together, these case studies illustrate the historical emergence and global spread of the memorial museum and show how this new cultural form of commemoration is intended to be used in contemporary societies around the world emerging from widely divergent forms of political violence.

New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. 227p.

By Jason E. Pierce

In the early nineteenth century, critics like Zebulon Pike and Washington Irving viewed the West as a “dumping ground” for free blacks and Native Americans, a place where they could be segregated from the white communities east of the Mississippi River. But as immigrant populations and industrialization took hold in the East, white Americans began to view the West as a “refuge for real whites.” The West had the most diverse population in the nation with substantial numbers of American Indians, Hispanics, and Asians, but Anglo-Americans could control these mostly disenfranchised peoples and enjoy the privileges of power while celebrating their presence as providing a unique regional character. The first comprehensive study to examine the construction of white racial identity in the West, Making the White Man’s West shows how these two visions of the West shaped the history of the region and influenced a variety of contemporary social issues in the West today. 

Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2016. 323p.

By  Werner Riess

This book offers the first attempt at understanding interpersonal violence in ancient Athens. While the archaic desire for revenge persisted into the classical period, it was channeled by the civil discourse of the democracy. Forensic speeches, curse tablets, and comedy display a remarkable openness regarding the definition of violence. But in daily life, Athenians had to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. They did so by enacting a discourse on violence in the performance of these genres, during which complex negotiations about the legitimacy of violence took place. Since discourse and reality were intertwined and the discourse was ritualized, actual violence might also have been partly ritualized. By still respecting the on-going desire to harm one’s enemy, this partial ritualization of violence helped restrain violence and thus contributed to Athens’ relative stability.

Berlin; Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co,  2012.  492p.

By David Brion Davis

Homicide has many social and psychological implications that vary from culture to culture and which change as people accept new ideas concerning guilt, responsibility, and the causes of crime. A study of attitudes toward homicide is therefore a method of examining social values in a specific setting. Homicide in American Fiction, 1798–1860 is the first book to contrast psychological assumptions of imaginative writers with certain social and intellectual currents in an attempt to integrate social attitudes toward such diverse subjects as human evil, moral responsibility, criminal insanity, social causes of crime, dueling, lynching, the "unwritten law" of a husband's revenge, and capital punishment. In addition to works of literary distinction by Cooper, Hawthorne, Irving, and Poe, among others, Davis considers a large body of cheap popular fiction generally ignored in previous studies of the literature of this period. This is an engrossing study of fiction as a reflection of and a commentary on social problems and as an influence shaping general beliefs and opinions.

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 196f 367p.

By Jan Blommaert

Sociolinguistic evidence is an undervalued resource for social theory. In this book, Jan Blommaert uses contemporary sociolinguistic insights to develop a new sociological imagination, exploring how we construct and operate in online spaces, and what the implications of this are for offline social practice. Taking Émile Durkheim’s concept of the ‘social fact’ (social behaviours that we all undertake under the influence of the society we live in) as the point of departure, he first demonstrates how the facts of language and social interaction can be used as conclusive refutations of individualistic theories of society such as 'Rational Choice'. Next, he engages with theorizing the post-Durkheimian social world in which we currently live. This new social world operates 'offline' as well as 'online' and is characterized by 'vernacular globalization', Arjun Appadurai’s term to summarise the ways that larger processes of modernity are locally performed through new electronic media. Blommaert extrapolates from this rich concept to consider how our communication practices might offer a template for thinking about how we operate socially. Above all, he explores the relationship between sociolinguistics and social practice In Durkheim and the Internet, Blommaert proposes new theories of social norms, social action, identity, social groups, integration, social structure and power, all of them animated by a deep understanding of language and social interaction. In drawing on Durkheim and other classical sociologists including Simmel and Goffman, this book is relevant to students and researchers working in sociolinguistics as well as offering a wealth of new insights to scholars in the fields of digital and online communications, social media, sociology, and digital anthropology.

London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 136p.

Edited by Eric Schaefer

Sex Scene suggests that what we have come to understand as the sexual revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s was actually a media revolution. In lively essays, the contributors examine a range of mass media—film and television, recorded sound, and publishing—that provide evidence of the circulation of sex in the public sphere, from the mainstream to the fringe. They discuss art films such as I am Curious (Yellow), mainstream movies including Midnight Cowboy, sexploitation films such as ;Mantis in Lace, the emergence of erotic film festivals and of gay pornography, the use of multimedia in sex education, and the sexual innuendo of The Love Boat. Scholars of cultural studies, history, and media studies, the contributors bring shared concerns to their diverse topics. They highlight the increasingly fluid divide between public and private, the rise of consumer and therapeutic cultures, and the relationship between identity politics and individual rights. The provocative surveys and case studies in this nuanced cultural history reframe the "sexual revolution" as the mass sexualization of our mediated world.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 481p.

Edited by Rainer Greifeneder, Mariela E. Jaffé, Eryn J. Newman, and Norbert Schwarz

This volume examines the phenomenon of fake news by bringing together leading experts from different fields within psychology and related areas, and explores what has become a prominent feature of public discourse since the first Brexit referendum and the 2016 US election campaign. Dealing with misinformation is important in many areas of daily life, including politics, the marketplace, health communication, journalism, education, and science. In a general climate where facts and misinformation blur, and are intentionally blurred, this book asks what determines whether people accept and share (mis)information, and what can be done to counter misinformation? All three of these aspects need to be understood in the context of online social networks, which have fundamentally changed the way information is produced, consumed, and transmitted. The contributions within this volume summarize the most up-to-date empirical findings, theories, and applications and discuss cutting-edge ideas and future directions of interventions to counter fake news. Also providing guidance on how to handle misinformation in an age of “alternative facts”, this is a fascinating and vital reading for students and academics in psychology, communication, and political science and for professionals including policy makers and journalists.

New York; London: Routledge, 2021. 252p.

Edited by Richard Rogers

There is growing awareness about how social media circulate extreme viewpoints and turn up the temperature of public debate. Posts that exhibit agitation garner disproportionate engagement. Within this clamour, fringe sources and viewpoints are mainstreaming, and mainstream media are marginalized. This book takes up the mainstreaming of the fringe and the marginalization of the mainstream. In a cross-platform analysis of Google Web Search, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, 4chan and TikTok, we found that hyperpartisan web operators, alternative influencers and ambivalent commentators are in ascendency. The book can be read as a form of platform criticism. It puts on display the current state of information online, noting how social media platforms have taken on the mantle of accidental authorities, privileging their own on-platform performers and at the same time adjudicating between claims of what is considered acceptable discourse.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023. 246p.

By Jonathan Beller

The Message is Murder analyses the violence bound up in the everyday functions of digital media. At its core is the concept of 'computational capital' - the idea that capitalism itself is a computer, turning qualities into quantities, and that the rise of digital culture and technologies under capitalism should be seen as an extension of capitalism's bloody logic. Engaging with Borges, Turing, Claude Shannon, Hitchcock and Marx, this book tracks computational capital to reveal the lineages of capitalised power as it has restructured representation, consciousness and survival in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ultimately The Message is Murder makes the case for recognising media communications across all platforms - books, films, videos, photographs and even language itself - as technologies of political economy, entangled with the social contexts of a capitalism that is inherently racial, 

London: Pluto Press, 2017. 225p.

By Sabine Binder

In this ground-breaking study, Sabine Binder analyses the complex ways in which female crime fictional victims, detectives and perpetrators in South African crime fiction resonate with widespread and persistent real crimes against women in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on a wide range of crime novels written over the last decade, Binder emphasises the genre’s feminist potential and critically maps its political work at the intersection of gender and race. Her study challenges the perception of crime fiction as a trivial genre and shows how, in South Africa at least, it provides a vibrant platform for social, cultural and ethical debates, exposing violence, misogyny and racism and shedding light on the problematics of law and justice for women faced with crime. Readership: All interested in crime fiction and its gender/racial political potential, its cultural relevance, its ethics and aesthetics, in South Africa and beyond.

Leiden, NETH: Brill. 2020. 252p.

By Peter Kishore Saval

  Hate, malice, rage, and enmity: what would Shakespeare’s plays be without these demonic, unruly passions? Shakespeare in Hate studies how the tirades and unrestrained villainy of Shakespeare’s art explode the decorum and safety of our sanitized lives and challenge the limits of our selfhood. Everyone knows Shakespeare to be the exemplary poet of love, but how many celebrate his clarifying expressions of hatred? How many of us do not at some time feel that we have come away from his plays transformed by hate and washed clean by savage indignation? Saval fills the great gap in the interpretation of Shakespeare’s unsocial feelings. The book asserts that emotions, as Aristotle claims in the Rhetoric, are connected to judgments. Under such a view, hatred and rage in Shakespeare cease to be a “blinding” of judgment or a loss of reason, but become claims upon the world that can be evaluated and interpreted. The literary criticism of anger and hate provides an alternative vision of the experience of Shakespeare’s theater as an intensification of human experience that takes us far beyond criticism’s traditional contexts of character, culture, and ethics. The volume, which is alive to the judgmental character of emotions, transforms the way we see the rancorous passions and the disorderly and disobedient demands of anger and hatred. Above all, it reminds us why Shakespeare is the exemplary creator of that rare yet pleasurable thing: a good hater.  

London; New York: Routledge, 2015. 177p.

By Mark Pizzato

From the Preface: Why do humans perform acts of violence for a watching audience? This book

explores the performance of violence in various cultures, from ancient human and animal sacrifices to modern sports and cinema, through psychoanalytic theories and theatrical paradigms. How is the sublimation of human sacrifice today, on sports fields and movie screens, like and unlike actual bloodshed in prior cultures? Does it create a current community of ritual belief in the divine powers of mythic heroes and demons? What effects might melodramatic violence have on a mass audience--with purely good and evil forces battling apocalyptically onscreen especially after September 11, 2001, and the subsequent "war on terrorism" in our new millennium? Is a fundamental catharsis of fear and desire, of terrorist paranoia and capitalist greed, still pos- sible today, through complex characters and tragic violence, involving our mass-media warriors and godlike stars?

NY. SUNY Press. 2005. 260p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Felice D. Blake

Felice D. Blake’s Black Love, Black Hate: Intimate Antagonisms in African American Literature highlights the pervasive representations of intraracial deceptions, cruelties, and contempt in Black literature. Literary criticism has tended to focus on Black solidarity and the ways that a racially linked fate has compelled Black people to counter notions of Black inferiority with unified notions of community driven by political commitments to creative rehumanization and collective affirmation. Blake shows how fictional depictions of intraracial conflict perform necessary work within the Black community, raising questions about why racial unity is so often established from the top down and how loyalty to Blackness can be manipulated to reinforce deleterious forms of subordination to oppressive gender, sexual, and class norms.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2018. 182p,

By David John Brennan

In 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were engaged in a top secret experiment. This was not, as many assume, the creation of a book of poetry. A book emerged, to be sure—the landmark Lyrical Ballads. But in Murder Ballads, David John Brennan posits that the two poets were in fact pursuing far different ends: to birth from their poems a singular, idealized Poet. Despite their success, such Frankensteinian pursuits proved rife with consequence for the men. Doubts and questions plagued them: What does it mean to be a poet if your work is not your own? Who is best fit to lay claim to a parcel of poetic property that was collaboratively crafted and bequeathed to a fictitious Poet? How does one kill a Poet born of one’s own hand? Blending critical examination with jocular playlets-in-verse featuring the authors of the two books in baffled conversation.

Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2016. 160p.

Edited by Gerardo Del Guercio

This collection offers six critical essays on the topic of psychology in Edgar Allan Poe. It came together as a response to a visible absence of this subject in recent scholarship. The volume presents Edgar Allan Poe as one of the pioneers in psychology, who often anticipated major theoretical trends and ideas in psychology in his incessant explorations of the relationship between behavior and the psyche. Scrutinizing serial killer narratives, obsessive narratives through Jungian unconscious, Lacanian Das Ding, doppelg angers, intersubjectivity, and the interrelationship between the material world and imaginative faculties, the essays reveal the richness and the complexity of Poe's work and its pertinence to contemporary culture.

 Berlin: Logos Verlag Berlin,  2019. 168p.

By Gene. D. Phillips

From the Introduction: “….In sum, this book presents an in-depth discussion of several gangster films, some of which are familiar members of the gangster genre, like John: Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, and some that deserve to be better known, for example, Stephen Frears’s The Grifters. That a few meaningful books on the gangster film have appeared throughout the years demonstrates the continued interest in the genre….in this volume, I include some overlooked crime movies that deserve more attention than they have received. In addition, I have interviewed film directors, as well as other artists and technicians, associated with the films I treat. I also focus on some more recent movies, along with some from the classic period. These later movies are reminders that the gangster genre is still with us and is not going away.

NY. Rowman & Littlefield. 2014. 204p. CONTAINS MARK-UP