Last semester, as part of this winter Colloquium, the RTG Ambivalent Enmity at Heidelberg University invited to speak at one of the sessions members of the ARENAS consortium.
Ambivalent Enmity is a postgraduate research and training program at Heidelberg University and the Heidelberg University of Jewish Studies. It aims to reveal the ambivalences of enmity and develop adequate tools to analyse their construction, representation, enactment, and experience. Ambivalent Enmity starts from the hypothesis that enmity must be understood as a processual, relational, and deeply ambivalent category. Existing research in fields such as peace and conflict studies, international law, sociology, and anthropology often conceives of enmity as a conflict between self-contained actors. The programme’s studies complement this understanding by combining expertise in regional studies with approaches from the social sciences as well as history, linguistics, literary studies, philosophy, psychology, and the history of art.
Ana Yara Postigo Fuentes from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and Dimitra Niaouri from Cergy Paris Université addressed the Colloquium, informing them about the objectives of the ARENAS project, the progress to date and in particular their own research. Ana Yara is the Leader of ARENAS Work Package 2. She and her team recently published one of the first key pieces of research for ARENAS, Identifying and Characterising Extremist Narratives – a Literature Review, which is available to download from our website. Dimitra is a Ph. D candidate whose primary objective is to use Machine Learning to effectively delineate extremist narratives within diverse corpora, spanning various contexts such as social media and political discourse.
