CALL FOR PAPERS (CLOSED)

We are pleased to announce the Braga INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ONLINE HATE SPEECH, which will take place at the University of Minho, Braga, Portugal, on 7-9 July 2022. We earnestly expect that Covid restrictions will be over by July all over Europe, so we can enjoy a pleasant, relaxed in-person meeting. Even so, we will closely monitor any remaining sanitation protocols so as to ensure the health and safety of all our attendees and staff.

The conference stems from a three-year project involving researchers from five European countries, in which a large corpus of online verbal interactions was extracted from social media and annotated for analysis. The analytical results will be presented at the conference, which aims to attract external participation from scholars and students interested in the widespread and ever-growing expression of hate, prejudice and discrimination in computer-mediated social platforms.

We welcome 300-word abstracts for 20-minute oral presentations on a variety of topics dealing with the broad phenomenon of hate on the Internet, with a special focus on reader comments and interactions. Proposals should be sent by email to Prof. Isabel Ermida at iermida@elach.uminho.pt (see "Abstract submission" page) until 31 March, 2022.

Possible topics include, but are not restricted to:

  • Language patterns for hate speech detection

  • Hate speech vs. aggressive speech: definition challenges

  • Impoliteness Studies and Hate Speech Analysis

  • Speech act patterns in hate speech (insulting, threatening, inciting, accusing...)

  • Pragmatic strategies in hate speech: othering, blame reversal, denial, agency deletion...

  • Humor, ridicule and indirectness in online hate speech

  • Building and annotating hate speech corpora

  • NLP (Natural Language Processing) of Online Hate Speech

  • Hate speech victimization

  • Legal issues in online hate speech

  • Hate speech vs. hate crime

  • Analysis of online hate speech in learning and teaching contexts

  • Hate speech vs. free speech: philosophical and political implications

  • Sociolinguistic variables of online hate speech

      • Hate speech and gender

      • Hate speech and age

      • hate speech and nationality

      • Hate speech and ethnicity

      • Hate speech and class

      • Hate speech and identity (physical and sexual identity; ideological and political identity; religious identity)

  • Types of prejudice in online hate speech: profiling authors and targets:

      • Sexism

      • Ageism

      • Nationalism

      • Racism

      • Classism

      • Ableism

      • Religious discrimination

      • Ideological discrimination

      • Sexual orientation discrimination


The conference intends to be an interdisciplinary venue for discussion of online hate speech. As such, it accepts contributions from various scientific areas, such as:

  • Linguistics (Corpus Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, etc.)

  • Media Studies

  • Communication Studies

  • Social Sciences

  • Computer Science

  • Psychology

  • Law

  • Political Philosophy

  • Education