Iganski and Sweiry – Social Media and the Gaza conflict of 2014

The FORGE is pleased to announce our upcoming internal speakers: Prof Paul Iganski and Dr Abe Sweiry (Law; Centre for Law & Society; Centre for Crime, Law & Justice). Details of their talk are below:

TITLE
Social Media and the Gaza conflict of 2014

ABSTRACT
It is now well-known that each time there is an upsurge in the Israel-Palestine conflict there is a rise in violent and other abusive incidents against Jews around the world. So it was in 2014 with Israel’s ‘Operation Protective Edge’ military operation in July and August. This time around, however, a seeming upsurge of anti-Jewish abuse over social media was noticeable. By the end of July 2014, the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz reported “an explosion” of such abuse on social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Using corpus approaches, we carried out a rapid response analysis of the phenomenon on Twitter to inform a forthcoming report of the All-Party Parliamentary Committee Against Antisemitism for an inquiry established by the Committee following the 2014 Gaza war. In this seminar, we will discuss our methods of analysis, the key findings, and the potential we see for the future in using corpus approaches for the analysis of antisemitism and other manifestations of discriminatory discourse.

TIME & PLACE
1400-1500, Thu 5th Feb, County South C89 (Meeting Room 7)

Lancaster University staff members and students are welcome to attend.