Find out more about self-funded PhD projects in areas where we already have supervisors active and engaged in the research topic in our International Policing and Public Protection Research Institute (IPPPRI).
Intended 1st Supervisor: Dr Elisa Orofino, Senior Research Fellow & Academic Lead, Extremism and Counter-Terrorism, IPPPRI
Intended 2nd Supervisor Dr William Allchorn, Senior Research Fellow, Extremism and Counter-Terrorism, IPPPRI
Intended 3rd Supervisor Dr Lakshmi Babu Saheer, Senior Lecturer in Computing, School of Computing and Information Science
News sharing on social media is ubiquitous and extends across demographics, platforms, and political ideologies (Kümpel et al, 2015). Online extremist communities are no exception, with a barrage of embedded news stories populating the social media feeds of extremist groups, albeit with their own conspiratorial and accelerationist framing (Phadke & Mitra, 2021; Peucker & Fisher, 2022; Dowling, 2024).
Whilst there are established studies on terroristic and extremist ‘outlinking’ for recruitment purposes (McDonald, 2022; MacDonald et al, 2022), we do not know enough about the functions, activities, and sources of online news sharing by extremist groups, cross-ideologically in the UK.
Particularly relevant to current tragic events in Britain, i.e. the Southport killings in July 2024 (Merseyside Police, 1 August 2024), the proposed project will aim to advance currently knowledge by using a mixed methodology to exploit UK-based datasets pertaining to extremist online news sharing to identify its functions, the type and factual accuracy of different sources used and how online new sharing may contribute to shaping radicalisation within different ideological milieux (e.g. Islamists and far-right groups).
The proposed projects will aim to investigate:
The prospective project will rely on a mixed methods research approach, using qualitative identification of the specific functions and behaviours, as well as computational topic analysis of the factual accuracy and key types of sources used in extremist news sharing activities within their online communications (Groundviews, 2019; Chadwick & Vaccari, 2019).
The perspective audience of this research would be academics, research centres, independent researchers from around the world whose research interests are connected to security studies, criminology, sociology, social psychology. Policymakers will also be a perspective audience as this topic (vocal/non-violent extremism) sits at the forefront of local, national and international security agendas.
This project is self-funded.
Details of studentships for which funding is available are selected by a competitive process and are advertised on our jobs website as they become available.
For more information about this opportunity please contact:
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If you have an idea for a project that does not align with one of the pre-defined projects above, please contact us at ahsspgrrec@aru.ac.uk