Policing PhD project opportunities with IPPPRI

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).

Supervisory team

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

Project outline

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.

Key objectives

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:

  1. The specific functions news sharing plays among extremist groups in the UK (Törnberg & Nissen, 2023);
  2. The specific news sharing behaviours executed among extremist groups in the UK;
  3. The news sources used as part of extremist news sharing activities;
  4. The factual accuracy of sources and extremist framings with regard to specific news stories;
  5. The similarities and differences across different ideological groupings when it comes to news sharing functions, behaviours, and sources used to support their claims.

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.

Read more about project outline.

Where you'll study

Chelmsford

Funding

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.

Next steps

For more information about this opportunity please contact:

If you have an enquiry about applying for a research degree, please email [email protected]

For administrative enquiries about our research courses please email [email protected]

Responsibility for the administration of research degrees is held by the Doctoral School.

If you have an idea for a project that does not align with one of the pre-defined projects above, please contact us at [email protected]