Transcript – The Pragmatics of Othering: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Cyberhate

Howdy. My name is Brian Larson. I’m associate professor of law at Texas A&M University’s School of Law. This recording reports on the project titled The Pragmatics of Othering in a Critical Discourse Analysis of Cyberhate. I’m one of three principal investigators on the project. The other two are Dr. Jyotsna Vaid, who’s a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Texas A&M University, and Dr. Zora Eslami, who is a professor of educational psychology at Texas A&M University. Our effort here is to explore interventions that might counter hate speech and extremism online from the previous legal perspectives on this topic. Allow us to identify what counts as hate speech, the tend to underspecified its scope. Natural language processing has focused intensive attention on automated detection of hate speech. Our T3 project allows us to jointly direct empirical study, which has previously been lacking, to identify three things. One psycholinguistic mechanisms involved in processing and countering hate speech to effective educational interventions, including counter narratives and three argumentation theoretic ways of imposing social costs on hate speech. Thanks to funding from the Texas A&M Triad’s for Transformation Project, this interdisciplinary group has been able to come together and apply different disciplinary frames to this problem in hopes of developing a solution.