Description, PLAN, GOALS

For most societies in today’s world, digital communities have become core components of social habitats. The rapid development of the Web 2.0 has facilitated the creation of digital environments where users co-create their own communities by establishing their routines and norms, engaging in their own rituals or participating in discussions (Margetts et al., 2016; Tufecki, 2017). As scholarly voices within the field of communication, discourse studies and social psychology have suggested (Guan and Tate 2013; Maffie, 2020), the creation of individual and social identities that takes place in these digital communities is partly fueled by the interpersonal multimodal interaction that characterises these digital ecosystems. In fact, online communities are considerably sustained by their own interaction insofar as, in these settings, “identity work is interactional in nature” (Jacknick & Avni, 2017: 55).

Digital communication cannot be understood without the concept of ‘affordances’, as the potential for particular action that certain features of online communities have (Majchrzak et al., 2013). The ability to communicate in synchronous and asynchronous ways almost instantaneously or the self-perceived idea of being able to communicate anonymously are, for instance, some key affordances to understand the impact of online interaction in/for digital communities. Despite the benefits that communicating in such ways can have, the same affordances are posing concerning challenges for social systems. Alienated by the influence of digital communities, many users adopt these discourses to operate in offline settings. As witnessed in recent years, many of these discourses are rooted in fake news and misinformation. This is triggering the awakening of ideologies that constitute challenges to values upon which the European Union is founded: human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, rule of law and human rights (European Union, 2021).

In creating this network of UNA Europa researchers, we plan to create a body of knowledge that sheds light on the connection between digital communities (across a plethora of online platforms, such as forums, Twitter, Instagram or WhatsApp) and discourses that challenge the foundational values of the EU. To start with, we aim to examine these complex issues via an international conference targeted at early career scholars taking a socio-discursive approach to the understanding of digital communities, especially in cases where the EU values are at stake. As part of our global mission and objectives, we seek:

1) to explore the role of digital communities in the creation, reproduction and perpetuation of social discourses that pose challenges to core European values and identities, with an emphasis on gender equality, LGBTQI+, an inclusive EU citizenship and climate change,

2) to investigate the impact of online multimodal discourse and communication within digital communities as the fabric of many of the challenges faced by the EU these days,

3) to examine how digital communities and digital communication foster individual and social alienation in the digital age, prompted by the ecosystems created in online contexts that frequently rely on misinformation, fake news or unchecked facts.