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Addressing Challenges and Opportunities in Online Extremism Research

Saturday, October 23, 2021 to Sunday, October 24, 2021

Event Details

Addressing Challenges and Opportunities in Online Extremism Research: An Interdisciplinary Perspective
October 23-24, 2021
Co-organized along CSCW 2021 Conference
https://sites.google.com/view/cscw21extremismworkshop/home



Recent political and cultural upheavals around the globe highlight the importance of studying extremism in online spaces. The CSCW community has shown growing interest in exploring the information and influence operations, use of language and multimedia and finance structures in online extremism movements. The goal of this workshop is to broaden the current research by considering multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural aspects of online extremism research. This workshop brings together international researchers to discuss challenges and new opportunities to help (1) understand the representativeness and validity of the data used for studying extremism (2) uncover nuances in extremism research across countries and cultures (3) build norms for platform governance and policies (4) develop critical perspectives on extremism studies addressing questions such as research ethics and bias (5) promoting research efforts to aid victims of the extremism (6) leverage extremism research for aiding the recovery and social support for populations involved in online extremism.
Workshop Goals:

(1) Facilitate networking, connections, and community identity of researchers from multiple disciplines such as social psychology, computer science, criminology, epidemiology, social justice studying online extremism.
(2) Discuss and propose ideas relevant to the five themes of the workshop.
(3) Encourage future interdisciplinary collaborations on the ideas generated during the workshop


Topics of interest:
In this workshop, we aim to reach beyond the concepts of online incivility, toxicity, hate speech, harassment, or online harm and also consider ideologically driven extremism based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, caste, and political affiliation. As such, we invite ideas researching both, online harms, hate speech, and harassment relevant to ideological extremism and the broader level online ecosystem of ideological extremism. Keeping in mind the socio-political complexity of ideological extremism, this workshop focuses on bringing together researchers from diverse countries and disciplines such as computational social science, HCI, criminology, social psychology, epidemiology, and political science to facilitate further dialogue on six main themes of the workshop:

— Extremism Studies and Data
— Extremism across Cultures
— Extremism and Governance
— Extremism Research Ethics
— Aiding Victims of Extremism
— Recovery from Online Extremism


Submission guidelines:

- Authors can submit a 2-6 pages position paper or a 300 word abstract
- The accepted papers/abstracts will be hosted on the website upon acceptance
- Position papers will be invited for presentations or lightning talks during the workshop
- Both position papers and abstracts should be able to identify at least one or more themes outlined on the website. 
- Submissions are being accepted through this google form: https://forms.gle/9cxLcoF5paCk1w9MA


Important dates:

- Paper submission deadline: 10th September 2021
- Acceptance notifications: 17th September, 2021

Organizing committee:
- Shruti Phadke, University of Washington
- Jessie Seiler, University of Washington
- Tanushree Mitra, University of Washington
- Kiran Garimella, MIT
- Matthew Costello, Clemson University
- James Hawdon, Virginia Tech


Contact:

phadke@uw.edu

We look forward to seeing you at the workshop!