By Ana Yara Postigo Fuentes, Heinrich-Heine-Universität
On November 15th and 16th, the international workshop “Methodological Approaches to Narratives in Extremist Discourses” took place at the Haus der Universität. The workshop was led by the project members from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Ana Yara Postigo Fuentes and Rolf Kailuweit, members of the Department of Romance Studies, and Alexander Ziem and Stefan Hartman, members of the Department of German Studies.
This workshop was held as part of Work Package 2 of the ARENAS project brought together the researchers of this working group to inform about the research status of the individual members and to present the first results of their research. The main topic of Work Package 2 is the investigation of extremist discourses and narratives, and the goal is to elaborate methodological approaches to analyse these discourses and narratives.
Participants included members of this Work Package: the researchers from Düsseldorf, Julien Longhi from the University of Cergy and Darja Fišer and Kristina Pahor de Maiti of the Inštitut za Novejšo Zgodovino. Furthermore, some PhD students presented their doctoral dissertations which also deal with the topic of extremism: Andreas Blombach, Phillip Heinrich, Fabian Schäfer and Tamara Fuchs from the Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen-Nürnberg, Mara Nogai from the University of Düsseldorf and Karolina Küsters from the University Bonn.
Some researchers from Departments of German Studies at other universities also presented their research work on extremism and narratives: Friedemann Vogel and Fabian Deus from the University Siegen, Noah Bubenhofer from the University Zürich and Sebastian Zollner from the University Greifswald. The research focuses on corpus linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse linguistic and computer linguistic analysis, the corpora are composed of different languages so that it is possible to compare the situation of extremis discourses and narratives inside Europe, or rather with other parts of the world (e.g. Japan).
The workshop was also open to any other interested students, who were able to gain ideas and inspiration for their final theses from the presentations.
