Book Launch: The Far Right and the Media: International Trends and Perspectives
Edited by Imogen Richards (Routledge 2026)
When: 10 February, 7pm GMT / 11am PST
This online seminar marks the launch of The Far Right and the Media: International Trends and Perspectives (Routledge, 2026), an edited volume exploring the relationship between far-right politics and contemporary media systems.
Bringing together interdisciplinary scholarship and international case studies, the book examines how media practices, institutional logics, and platform dynamics shape the visibility, legitimacy, and normalisation of far-right actors and ideas. Contributors address themes including euphemisation, provocation, disinformation, platform capitalism, and the political aesthetics of extremism, drawing on cases from Australia, Europe, Israel, and North America.
The seminar will feature presentations from several of the book’s contributors, reflecting on the volume’s core arguments and their implications for journalism, public debate, and democratic governance.
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Presenters
Carmen Celestini is a lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her area of research is the convergence of religion with conspiracy theories, extremism, hate, and disinformation in political mobilizations (online and offline) in North America. She is the co-author of The Canadian Far-Right and Conspiracy Theories (Routledge), and the author of two books to be published in 2026, God’s Angry Men: The Political Legacy of the John Birch Society and Constructed Victimhood: A Pathway to Mainstreaming Hate on Social Media both with Bloomsbury Publishing.
Greta Jasser is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut für Demokratieforschung at Georg-August-University Göttingen, as well as a at IDZ Jena. She earned her PhD from Leuphana University Lüneburg. Her research analyses the nexus of far- right and male supremacist social movements and technology. Jasser further researches the normalization of the far-right through aesthetic in the RADICAL NORM Project. She is particularly interested in alternative platforms and their significance for group and ideology formation as well as in the field of digital (counter)publics and platform governance.
Ayse Lokmanoglu is an Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Studies in the College of Communication and affiliated Faculty at Computing and Data Science at Boston University. She studies the dynamics of information integrity, the politicization of science, and visual communication in the digital public sphere. Her research integrates computational social science and digital humanities to analyze large-scale textual, visual, and network data, examining how misinformation, conspiracies, and scientific claims circulate across online platforms. In addition to conducting empirical studies, she develops tools and methods that enable humanities and social science researchers to analyze big data and visual media at scale. Using techniques such as automated text and image analysis, topic modeling, and network mapping, her work advances understanding of how digital ecosystems shape public trust, polarization, and civic discourse.
Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor and broadcaster. His books include No Way But This: In Search of Paul Robeson, Fascists Among Us; Crimes Against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating and several others. He is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne.
Imogen Richards is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Deakin University. Her research focuses on the political economy of political violence, relationships between different forms of politically violent actor, and the dynamics of mediatised violence in news and digital media. She is the author of Neoliberalism and Neo-Jihadism: Propaganda and Finance in Al Qaeda and Islamic State (Manchester University Press, 2020) and The Aesthetic Politics of Far-right Environmentalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025); co-author of Criminologists in the Media: A Study of Newsmaking (Routledge, 2022) and Global Heating and the Australian Far Right (Routledge, 2023); and editor of The Far Right and the Media: International Trends and Perspectives (Routledge, 2026).
