Digital Geopolitics: Geopolitical Imaginations of the "New Right" in Digital Media

• Applicant: Dr. Thilo Wiertz
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 455052174

In recent years, contributions by members of the „New Right“ have substantially contributed to the spread of racist, authoritarian and nationalist world views in political discourse. Such world views are geopolitical, insofar as they entail imaginations about the relation of society and space. Digital media has played a crucial role in popularizing geopolitical imaginations of the “New Right”, particularly for two reasons: first, because digital media allows for decentralized production and distribution of content; second, digital media has been shown to benefit affective messages, partially due to its multimodal character. However, very little research in Geography and related social sciences has thus far examined the production and dissemination of geopolitical imaginations of the “New Right” in digital media. Hence, the proposed project analyzes contributions by the “New Right” on Blogs, Youtube and Twitter that will be collected systematically over a period of twelve months. The goal is to identify geopolitical concepts and connected affective potentials, and analyze their resonance and circulation in the digital media space. Thereby, the project aims to contribute to recent engagements with the “New Right” in political geography and to research on popular geopolitics that emphasizes the role of media in the construction of geopolitical world views. Conceptually, the project draws on discourse analysis, yet sketches an assemblage theory approach to ‘digital discourses’ that considers regularities of meaning, but also the affective potential and mediated circulation of articulations. Methodologically, this is realized by combining quantitative and qualitative methods from discourse analysis, affect research, and online research. Using digital methods, we will create a research database of app. 30 million tweets, 4,000 blog posts and 1,500 Youtube videos. In a first step, we quantitatively identify political topics and events prominent in media contributions by the “New Right”. Based on this, we identify three topics for a detailed analysis in order to qualitatively examine geopolitical concepts and connected affects. In a third step, we analyze the resonance and circulation of the identified geopolitical concepts and affects within and across the considered media platforms. Given the social and political relevance of the topic, the project aims to make results accessible beyond an academic audience. To this end, the project fosters transdisciplinary collaborations and publishes results on an open access project blog.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants