[Webinar] Online Aggression: A discourse-analytic approach

Online aggression is a problem of increasing concern in the digital age. To date, there is no consensus as to what precisely constitutes online aggression, as it is a highly complex issue subject to a range of motives, methods, and interpretations. However, what we do know is that aggressive behavior online is primarily enacted and sustained through language and discourse, such as posts on discussion forums and reactive comments in social media. Language-based research on online aggression is extremely limited. This talk aims to engage with recent arguments in linguistic research that conceptualize hate speech as recontextualized discursive practice (Baider, 2020; Lee, 2020, 2021). I first review the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of language aggression drawing on insights from pragmatics and discourse analysis, focusing on research on trolling, hate speech, and doxxing. I then discuss illustrative examples from my recent work on covert hate speech online, that is, hate speech…