The European Commission awarded Italian researcher Eleonora Esposito a Marie Sklodowska Curie grant to develop a project at the University of Navarra entitled, “Hatred on line against women leaders in Europe: A multimodal critical analysis assisted by corpus” (WONT-HATE). She will join the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), Navarra’s humanities and social sciences research center, within the Public Discourse project.

According to Esposito, contemporary digital media "has great potential for helping to strengthen female participation in political and institutional processes, but ithas also opened up new channels for gender attacks in the public sphere."

In particular, the project will focus on online misogyny phenomena such as hate speech based on gender, threats of rape and sexual harassment. To this end, it will analyze the discursive and rhetorical multimodal strategies of relevant attacks in four countries, including Italy, Spain, France and the United Kingdom.

Digital security, gender violence and equality

"WONT-HATE aims to contribute to the current debate on the use of social network data for social research, providing new critical, theoretical perspectives, as well as a transdisciplinary methodology for data selection and collection, and to contextualize the new dynamic of digital interaction," Esposito explains. Thus, she highlights her aim to "explore discourse as a social practice and jointly study the on-line and off-line realms, not as separate and independent spheres.”

WONT-HATE addresses issues related to digital security, gender violence and equality, aspects included in the Horizon 2020 Program and the European Union’s Strategic Commitment to Gender Equality 2016-2019.

The European Commission grants the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant to contribute to the development of research in the European Union. Financing comes from the Framework Program for Technological Research and Development (Horizon 2020). This grant is highly competitive and aims to promote talented researchers’ careers.

ICS currently employs two other Marie Curie researchers. Marco Demichelis works within the Religion and Civil Society project where he studies the Koran’s “verses of war” and Sarali Gintsburg began with ICS this academic year within Public Discourse with her ORFORCREA project, which investigates the cognitive foundations of creativity in verbal art.