Lecture by Dr. Louise Buckingham from the University of Auckland

On Wednesday, 5 February 2020, Dr. Louise Buckingham from the University of Auckland, New Zealand delivered a lecture Extreme parallels: a corpus-driven analysis of ISIS and far-right discourse.

In this lecture, Dr. Buckingham presented a study she published in collaboration with her PhD student in the New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online. The research is based on a corpus-aided analysis of the discourse of extreme right-wingers (the manifestos of A. Breivik and B. Tarrant) and the discourses of ISIL (Rumiyah propaganda journal). The focus of the analysis was psychological dimensions, semantic categories, and keywords in both discourses. Through this analysis, the authors managed to identify linguistic elements that contribute to the construction of narratives of hatred, danger and urgency.
In her lecture, Dr. Buckingham contextualized research by placing it in the broader social context of New Zealand, trying to bring to light the challenges that modern society faces, especially after the 2019 Christchurch massacre.