Online Misogyny and Sexual Harassment

Wednesday 17 June 5-7pm

Online spaces such as blogs, forums and Twitter are invaluable resources for feminist communities. However, due to its nature, the Internet also expands the space available for misogynistic discourses to spread and be heard and – as the cases of Caroline Criado-Perez and Mary Beard demonstrate – provides an outlet for ‘trolls’ to enact vitriolic attacks on women who publicly voice their opinions. Whilst encouraging progress has been made in increasing public and corporate awareness, we still have much to learn about this problem and about how we can start to tackle it. This seminar will discuss new research into the online harassment of women and explore how academic work can start to answer some of these questions. Topics up for discussion include: what methods can we use to track harassment on large social media platforms? What is the role of the law in addressing cyber-hate against women? What would a more ethical Internet look like and how might this be achieved?

Olga Jurasz is a lecturer in law at the Open University Law School. Her main research interests are public international law, human rights and legal regulation of gender-based violence. She has been recently working on a collaborative project addressing gender, cyberviolence and law.

Mark McGlashan (Lancaster University): “Twitter rape threats and the Discourse of Online Misogyny (DOOM): using corpus-assisted community analysis (COCOA) to detect abusive online discourse communities”

Mark McGlashan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. His PhD research focuses on applying a combination of Corpus Linguistics and Multimodal approaches to Critical Discourse Analysis in the analysis of representations of same-sex parent families in children’s picture books. He has also just finished a post as Senior Research Associate at the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS), also based at Lancaster University. His research there focused on combining Social Network Analysis, Discourse Analysis and Corpus linguistics to detect and analyse online discourse communities on the ESRC-funded project, “Twitter rape threats and the discourse of online misogyny” (ES/L008874/1). His main research interests are concerned with applying multimethodological approaches to Critical Discourse Analysis to issues of social exclusion and inequality.

Carl Miller is the Research Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos. It is the first British think tank unit dedicated to researching and understanding the digital world.  He develops new ways of understanding social media as a new part of social and political life. He wrote a weekly column on digital politics for The Sunday Times and is a social media commentator for Sky.  He is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College, London.

Chair: Laura Thompson

Attendance is free. Booking not required, although please notify us of your intent to attend at genderforum.city@gmail.com for catering purposes.