Björn Technau
Björn holds a PhD in German Linguistics as well as two Master's degrees (Master of Arts, Master of Education) from the University of Mainz, Germany. His research interests include the semantics/pragmatics interface, pejoration, multilingualism, language acquisition, and sociolinguistics, with a focus on conversation analysis and empirical research. As a linguist, Björn has held various positions, including Research Associate at the Research Center of Social and Cultural Studies Mainz (SoCuM), Language Consultant at the Goethe-Institut New York, Research Associate at the German Linguistics Department at Mainz University, and DAAD Lecturer at Nanjing University (China). During his 15 years of professional experience in the fields of international education and intercultural exchange, Björn has worked and carried out research in many different countries, including the U.S., Germany, Italy, India, Egypt, South Africa, China, and Afghanistan.
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Jörg Meibauer and Prof. Dr. Silvia Bonacchi
Address: Mainz, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Jörg Meibauer and Prof. Dr. Silvia Bonacchi
Address: Mainz, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany
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Papers by Björn Technau
The contributions in this Special Issue address various aspects of hostile narratives and attempts at dealing with them or countering them. They discuss both theoretical and practical challenges of studying hate speech and other types of prejudiced discourses, along with educational initiatives and other forms of moral courage on the part of individuals (Osswald et al. 2012).
In the first contribution, Björn Technau adopts a pragmatic perspective to examine the structural and functional characteristics of slur terms. Taking group-based slurs with their complex semantics under scrutiny, Technau situates them in the context of hate speech, thus revisiting definitions of the latter and providing an overview of the results of previous research. Politicians, for example, as he points out, tend to avoid explicitly racist terms, appealing instead to voters’ latent racism. His analysis of the pejorative, non-pejorative and neutral uses of ethnic slur terms, including cases of appropriation, leads him to the conclusion that to get a clear, accurate and comprehensive picture of the pragmatics of slur terms we need “to account for individual differences in their frequencies of use, their modes of use, and their pragmatic effects”.
In the article that follows, KhosraviNik and Esposito also underline the importance of various contextual factors which need to be considered while studying online hate. These, they argue can be situated on three levels: the social, cultural, as well as digital participatory level, and thus require an interdisciplinary approach. The authors set out to explore the interface between the social media communication paradigm, along with affordances it is based on, and cyberhate. Approaching online communication from the Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) perspective they identify and discuss diverse ways (including a sense of anonymity and de-individuation) in which the participatory web enables and facilitates incivility and violent behavior online. Since the main focus here is on verbal aggression targeting women – online misogyny – KhosraviNik and Esposito examine its various forms, going beyond the phenomena of trolling and flaming, along with motivations behind it and its social implications.
Questions concerning gender and sexuality and how these two are discursively constructed within hegemonic heterosexuality and heteronormativity paradigms are the focus of Fabienne Baider’s contribution. Applying a Foucauldian approach to sexualities in her quantitative and qualitative analysis of online comments focused on the LGBT community, the author identifies a range of frames and topoi used to construct LGBT identities in the Greek Cypriot context. Arguments forming the basis of homophobic hate speech, she demonstrates, draw on the notions of safety and security, family values and morality, majority vs majority rules, and pathology, and form part of wider institutional discourses of social stability, national continuity, even the nation’s survival. Baider argues here for the link between nationalism and compulsory hegemonic heteronormativity and emphasises the socio-normative impact of the Orthodox Church, once again highlighting the need for a fully-fledged contextual analysis of hostile narratives, taking into account their historical, socio-political, and cultural embedding.
Jurate Ruzaite’s contribution sheds light on the role that corpus linguistic methods and tools may play in the identification of hate speech in public discourse. Such identification process, as she demonstrates, is fraught with challenges, for example the lack of bias indicators, different genre conventions, and language variation due to diachronic change. Her study of Lithuanian online comments, which involves the analysis of wordlists, collocations, and formulaic language with the AntConc software, allows for identification of dominant patterns in the representation of certain groups. Yet, it also shows that rather than being overtly manifested in lexis, aggression is often expressed indirectly through creative language use, thus requiring qualitative methods of analysis.
The following three contributions focus on various dimensions of anti-immigration sentiment and their discursive manifestations, in particular in the British context. Andreas Musolff examines hostile attitudes towards multilingualism and multiculturalism. His analysis of the press and forum data reveals that the presence of foreign languages in the British public sphere is perceived as a threat to the “home” culture and thus, for the most part, is evaluated negatively. Despite being moderated, the Internet forum becomes a powerful platform to legitimise anti-immigrant attitudes: individual narratives based on commenters’ supposedly negative experience act as powerful argumentative tools, appealing to the general public’s emotions and concerns. Additionally, as Musolff points out, such negative perception and representation of multilingualism and multiculturalism is both constituted by and constitutive for dominant media discourses on migration.
Monika Kopytowska and Paul Chilton’s paper discusses Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech and its reception 50 years later in view of the rising anti-immigration sentiment and Brexit campaign. The authors provide an overview of dominant themes in migration-related discourses, devoting particular attention to the threat construction process. Drawing on the insights from neuroscience and cognitive linguistics, they demonstrate how particular lexical expressions and discursive strategies can act as powerful triggers of fear and anxiety, and thus potentially influence the audience’s cognitive, affective, and behavioural responses (which, they show, had its manifestations in the Brexit referendum voting patterns). In their analysis of Enoch Powell’s speech and its contemporary social media rendition, the authors explore the mechanisms underlying the process of recontextualization and the role of this process in facilitating the spread of hostile and prejudiced discourses.
Katerina Strani and Anna Szczepaniak Kozak also focus on anti-immigrant discourse and patterns of representation it employs. Analysing texts from the UK and Polish media, along with data from interviews with migrants, the authors identify discursive strategies of othering and their potential impact on the groups concerned. Among the strategies used with the aim of categorising, denigrating, oppressing and ultimately rejecting the Other five strategies present in both British and Polish data are identified and discussed, namely: (1) stereotyping, (2) whiteness as the norm, (3) racialization, (4) objectification, and (5) wrongly ascribed ethnicity. The interview data also provides important insights into the application of the above strategies and their effects in real life situations in which foreigners are involved.
The last two contributions shed light on the educational dimension of hate speech prevention as well as practices related to anti-extremism and counter-radicalisation. Marcel Klapp’s paper discusses programs and measures against Islamist-extremist messages implemented by both governmental and non-governmental institutions in Germany. Highlighting the need for “decentralized, horizontal and ‘value-based’ forms of strategic communication” Klapp argues that the main purpose of such educational and awareness-raising activities should be to enable young people to properly understand and respond to the ideologically loaded, hostile and/or prejudiced content. The “Salam Online” educational material produced by Zentrum für Islamische Theologie Münster, which Klapp presents here, serves as an example of an approach to countering Islamist-extremist ideology through enhancing media literacy, critical thinking and promoting “social models of coherence and commonality”.
Jelena Vujić, Mirjana Daničić and Tamara Aralica address one more important aspect of mediating hostility in the public sphere, namely translators’ work. Having identified the linguistico-pragmatic features of hate speech present in presidential campaigns-related discourse in the USA and Serbia in 2016 and 2017, the authors discuss the results of the case study concerning translation exercises based on these hateful texts which were used to examine Serbian students’ attitudes towards ethically and morally challenging language contents in their mother tongue and in English. While the groups targeted and the strategies are similar, Vujić et al. observe that translators’ moral and ethical norms are stronger in the former case, which is likely to affect the translational output (in translators’ mother tongue). The article thus brings up important questions about the role of translators, corroborating Mona Baker’s (2006: 151) argument that translators and interpreters are not “detached unaccountable professionals whose involvement begins and ends with the delivery of a linguistic product […] Consciously or otherwise, they translate texts and utterances that participate in creating, negotiating and contesting social reality”.
The contributions in this Special Issue address various aspects of hostile narratives and attempts at dealing with them or countering them. They discuss both theoretical and practical challenges of studying hate speech and other types of prejudiced discourses, along with educational initiatives and other forms of moral courage on the part of individuals (Osswald et al. 2012).
In the first contribution, Björn Technau adopts a pragmatic perspective to examine the structural and functional characteristics of slur terms. Taking group-based slurs with their complex semantics under scrutiny, Technau situates them in the context of hate speech, thus revisiting definitions of the latter and providing an overview of the results of previous research. Politicians, for example, as he points out, tend to avoid explicitly racist terms, appealing instead to voters’ latent racism. His analysis of the pejorative, non-pejorative and neutral uses of ethnic slur terms, including cases of appropriation, leads him to the conclusion that to get a clear, accurate and comprehensive picture of the pragmatics of slur terms we need “to account for individual differences in their frequencies of use, their modes of use, and their pragmatic effects”.
In the article that follows, KhosraviNik and Esposito also underline the importance of various contextual factors which need to be considered while studying online hate. These, they argue can be situated on three levels: the social, cultural, as well as digital participatory level, and thus require an interdisciplinary approach. The authors set out to explore the interface between the social media communication paradigm, along with affordances it is based on, and cyberhate. Approaching online communication from the Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) perspective they identify and discuss diverse ways (including a sense of anonymity and de-individuation) in which the participatory web enables and facilitates incivility and violent behavior online. Since the main focus here is on verbal aggression targeting women – online misogyny – KhosraviNik and Esposito examine its various forms, going beyond the phenomena of trolling and flaming, along with motivations behind it and its social implications.
Questions concerning gender and sexuality and how these two are discursively constructed within hegemonic heterosexuality and heteronormativity paradigms are the focus of Fabienne Baider’s contribution. Applying a Foucauldian approach to sexualities in her quantitative and qualitative analysis of online comments focused on the LGBT community, the author identifies a range of frames and topoi used to construct LGBT identities in the Greek Cypriot context. Arguments forming the basis of homophobic hate speech, she demonstrates, draw on the notions of safety and security, family values and morality, majority vs majority rules, and pathology, and form part of wider institutional discourses of social stability, national continuity, even the nation’s survival. Baider argues here for the link between nationalism and compulsory hegemonic heteronormativity and emphasises the socio-normative impact of the Orthodox Church, once again highlighting the need for a fully-fledged contextual analysis of hostile narratives, taking into account their historical, socio-political, and cultural embedding.
Jurate Ruzaite’s contribution sheds light on the role that corpus linguistic methods and tools may play in the identification of hate speech in public discourse. Such identification process, as she demonstrates, is fraught with challenges, for example the lack of bias indicators, different genre conventions, and language variation due to diachronic change. Her study of Lithuanian online comments, which involves the analysis of wordlists, collocations, and formulaic language with the AntConc software, allows for identification of dominant patterns in the representation of certain groups. Yet, it also shows that rather than being overtly manifested in lexis, aggression is often expressed indirectly through creative language use, thus requiring qualitative methods of analysis.
The following three contributions focus on various dimensions of anti-immigration sentiment and their discursive manifestations, in particular in the British context. Andreas Musolff examines hostile attitudes towards multilingualism and multiculturalism. His analysis of the press and forum data reveals that the presence of foreign languages in the British public sphere is perceived as a threat to the “home” culture and thus, for the most part, is evaluated negatively. Despite being moderated, the Internet forum becomes a powerful platform to legitimise anti-immigrant attitudes: individual narratives based on commenters’ supposedly negative experience act as powerful argumentative tools, appealing to the general public’s emotions and concerns. Additionally, as Musolff points out, such negative perception and representation of multilingualism and multiculturalism is both constituted by and constitutive for dominant media discourses on migration.
Monika Kopytowska and Paul Chilton’s paper discusses Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech and its reception 50 years later in view of the rising anti-immigration sentiment and Brexit campaign. The authors provide an overview of dominant themes in migration-related discourses, devoting particular attention to the threat construction process. Drawing on the insights from neuroscience and cognitive linguistics, they demonstrate how particular lexical expressions and discursive strategies can act as powerful triggers of fear and anxiety, and thus potentially influence the audience’s cognitive, affective, and behavioural responses (which, they show, had its manifestations in the Brexit referendum voting patterns). In their analysis of Enoch Powell’s speech and its contemporary social media rendition, the authors explore the mechanisms underlying the process of recontextualization and the role of this process in facilitating the spread of hostile and prejudiced discourses.
Katerina Strani and Anna Szczepaniak Kozak also focus on anti-immigrant discourse and patterns of representation it employs. Analysing texts from the UK and Polish media, along with data from interviews with migrants, the authors identify discursive strategies of othering and their potential impact on the groups concerned. Among the strategies used with the aim of categorising, denigrating, oppressing and ultimately rejecting the Other five strategies present in both British and Polish data are identified and discussed, namely: (1) stereotyping, (2) whiteness as the norm, (3) racialization, (4) objectification, and (5) wrongly ascribed ethnicity. The interview data also provides important insights into the application of the above strategies and their effects in real life situations in which foreigners are involved.
The last two contributions shed light on the educational dimension of hate speech prevention as well as practices related to anti-extremism and counter-radicalisation. Marcel Klapp’s paper discusses programs and measures against Islamist-extremist messages implemented by both governmental and non-governmental institutions in Germany. Highlighting the need for “decentralized, horizontal and ‘value-based’ forms of strategic communication” Klapp argues that the main purpose of such educational and awareness-raising activities should be to enable young people to properly understand and respond to the ideologically loaded, hostile and/or prejudiced content. The “Salam Online” educational material produced by Zentrum für Islamische Theologie Münster, which Klapp presents here, serves as an example of an approach to countering Islamist-extremist ideology through enhancing media literacy, critical thinking and promoting “social models of coherence and commonality”.
Jelena Vujić, Mirjana Daničić and Tamara Aralica address one more important aspect of mediating hostility in the public sphere, namely translators’ work. Having identified the linguistico-pragmatic features of hate speech present in presidential campaigns-related discourse in the USA and Serbia in 2016 and 2017, the authors discuss the results of the case study concerning translation exercises based on these hateful texts which were used to examine Serbian students’ attitudes towards ethically and morally challenging language contents in their mother tongue and in English. While the groups targeted and the strategies are similar, Vujić et al. observe that translators’ moral and ethical norms are stronger in the former case, which is likely to affect the translational output (in translators’ mother tongue). The article thus brings up important questions about the role of translators, corroborating Mona Baker’s (2006: 151) argument that translators and interpreters are not “detached unaccountable professionals whose involvement begins and ends with the delivery of a linguistic product […] Consciously or otherwise, they translate texts and utterances that participate in creating, negotiating and contesting social reality”.