Dr Matthias J. Becker is a linguist, with a strong focus on pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, (critical) discourse and media studies, research on prejudice and nationalism, as well as on internet/social media studies. At Freie Universität Berlin, he read linguistics, philosophy and literature, and has worked in several research projects on the use of language in political and media campaigns. His doctoral dissertation, published with Nomos in 2018, analyses the linguistic construction of national pride, antisemitic stereotypes and demonising historical analogies in British and German discourses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An English version of the book (with the title “Antisemitism in Reader Comments: Analogies for Reckoning with the Past”) was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2021. Since 2019, Matthias is a postdoc researcher at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) at Technische Universität in Berlin. Furthermore, he is affiliated to CENTRIC (Sheffield Hallam University) and to the Vidal Sassoon Center at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. In his postdoc project, he examines various forms of antisemitic and racist hate speech on British news websites in the context of Brexit. Next to antisemitism, he conducted studies on the concept of national racism and antiziganism. A consistent link between all his research activities is the question of how implicit hate speech – apparently accepted within various milieus of the political mainstream – is constructed and what conditions its production is subject to.
Dr Laura Ascone’s research focuses on computer-mediated communication, on the expression of emotions, as well as on hate speech. She defended her PhD in Linguistics at the Université Paris-Seine. Her thesis on “The Radicalisation through the Expression of Emotions on the Internet” dealt with the rhetorical strategies used in both jihadist propaganda and institutional counter-narrative. She then conducted postdoctoral research at the Université de Lorraine on online hate speech against migrants. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) at the Technische Universität Berlin in the international project Decoding Antisemitism. She is also part of various research networks dealing with social issues such as Draine, a research group established as part of the Horizon 2020 European project PRACTICIES (Partnership against violent radicalisation in the cities).
Karolina Placzynta is a linguist and political scientist with a background in pragmatics, sociolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. Her research is centred on the mainstreaming and marginalisation of discourses in the media, normalisation of bias, and intersections of discriminatory discourses. Before joining the UK team of the Decoding Antisemitism project, she researched the patterns of discursive representations of immigration in the British press, in the process examining online media debates within the political mainstream. Apart from discourses of migration, racism and antisemitism, she is interested in the language of misogyny and gender inequality, as well as the language of social class dynamics. As an experienced educator, she is interested in translating research findings into successful strategies for teaching and training. She is a member of the DiscourseNet association.
Chloé Vincent is a linguist working on the French team of the Decoding Antisemitism project conducted by the Centre for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) at TU Berlin. She completed her MA in Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London in September 2020. She specialised in sociolinguistics, learning both quantitative and qualitative methods. Her master’s thesis consisted in analysing the attitudes of native French speakers towards French regional accents. In the previous years, she had completed her undergraduate degree in anthropology at Lumière University Lyon 2, and a degree in French language teaching at Grenoble Alpes University, while working as a software developer. She also holds a Master of Engineering degree from Grenoble INP Graduate School of Engineering. She is interested in discrimination and how it is maintained in and through language, especially in covert manifestations of discrimination in language, such as dog whistles, in politics as a way of carrying ideas that are no longer legal to hold publicly.