Otey Scruggs Memorial Lecture Featuring Jennifer V. Evans

“Illiberal
Memory and Transatlantic Hate Networks in the Twentieth- and Twenty-First
Centuries”

This talk applies
a data-driven analysis of online hate networks to trace how false framings of
the historical past, what we call historical misinformation, circulates across
platforms, shaping the politics of the center alongside the fringes. Through the
culling of large datasets from social media platforms, it analyzes how harmful
speech and civilizational rhetoric is circulated by far-right groups across
borders, noting specifically when and how they are taken up in the mainstream
as legitimate discourse.

We began with a basic question: to what extent is this
actually new? As much as the atomized publics of our current day create ideal
conditions for radical ideas to fester and circulate, it shows that it is
essential to look for linkages across time, drawing on interdisciplinary
methods from the fields of history, media and communication, and data science
to identify the tactics, strategies, and repertoires among such groups and
individuals.

In thinking about transatlantic hate networks and the migration of
people and ideas cross borders, this talk pieces together some of these
connections, with a focus on far-right hate —homegrown and imported.
Ultimately, it argues that illiberalism is not just a marker of authoritarian
regimes. It is real and underappreciated aspect of liberal democracy itself.

Jennifer Evans is professor of history at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, located on the unceded and unsurrended territories of the Anishnaabek/Omàmiwininìwag. She has written books and articles on the history of sexuality, photography, social media and memory. Her most recent books include “The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship After Fascism” (Duke University Press), an edited volume with Shelley Rose for Berghahn in celebration of the life and writing of Jean Quataert, and a co-written monograph “Holocaust Memory and the Digital Mediascape” (Bloomsbury, December 2023).

Evans is currently overseeing Populist Publics, a multi-year, multi-platform big data project on the weaponization of history and hate in social media networks. Alongside her academic writing, she undertakes collaborative digital projects. She is co-curator of the New Fascism Syllabus and the German Studies Collaboratory.