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Copyright

Dimitris Serafis; Janina Wildfeuer;

Published On

2025-05-02

Page Range

pp. 201–220

Language

  • English

9. Studying soft hate speech online

Synthesising approaches from multimodality research and argumentation theory

  • Dimitris Serafis (author)
  • Janina Wildfeuer (author)
Chapter of: Imagery of Hate Online(pp. 201–220)
In this chapter, we analyse the reasoning that underlies implicit forms of hate speech in online communication. Focusing particularly on the multimodal complexity of particular news items, we aim to identify soft manifestations of hate speech in visual-verbal combinations. To achieve this aim, we provide an integrative, multi-layered approach that includes analytical tools from both multimodality studies and argumentation theory. This helps us to build a semantic representation of the multimodal artefact, interpreting this semantic representation with regard to the aim of delimiting contextual ambiguity, and, finally, showcasing the argumentative structure of the news item to make the inferential reasoning explicit.

Contributors

Dimitris Serafis

(author)
Assistant Professor at University of Groningen
https://www.rug.nl/staff/d.serafis/?lang=en

Dr Dimitris Serafis is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts / Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG), Department of Communication and Information Studies, at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. His research interests lie at the intersection of critical discourse studies, social semiotics and multimodality, and argumentation studies, with his current focus being on topics such as racism, hate speech, populism and authoritarianism. He has published internationally on these topics in journals such as Discourse & Communication, Critical Discourse Studies, Journal of Language and Politics, Social Semiotics, Topoi, Informal Logic, Journal of Argumentation in Context. He is the Editor of the CADAAD Journal – Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines as well as sits at the Editorial Board of academic journals such as Argumentation (Springer) and Journal of Argumentation in Context (John Benjamins).

Janina Wildfeuer

(author)
Lecturer / Editor / Program Coordinator at University of Groningen
https://www.rug.nl/staff/j.wildfeuer/?lang=en

Dr Janina Wildfeuer is a multimodalist with a multi-faceted background in linguistics, semiotics, and discourse analysis. She has more than fifteen years of experience in working with visual and audiovisual communication and has built particular expertise in films and audiovisual data, comics, social media and games. In her position at the University of Groningen, Janina teaches classes on multimodality, digital communication, visual and audio-visual analysis, and works as programme coordinator of the Communication and Information Studies Master’s. She is also the Chief Editor of the journal 'Visual Communication', one of the key journals in the field of visual and multimodal communication, and Associate Editor for the speciality section 'Multimodality of Communication' with Frontiers in Communication. Janina has contributed to several edited collections and papers focused on the theoretical and methodological development of multimodality studies. Her work also provides valuable insights into corpus-analytical and empirically oriented projects on various media, including film, comics, and social media.