Dr. Dimitris Serafis.
Dimitris Serafis is Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication and Information Studies, Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen. His research interests lie at the intersection of critical discourse studies, multimodality and argumentation studies, with his current focus being on topics such as racism and hate speech, authoritarianism and populism in times of crises in Europe. His research has been published in journals such as Critical Discourse Studies, Discourse & Communication, Journal of Language and Politics, Topoi, Journal of Argumentation in Context, Informal Logic, Social Semiotics. He is the author of the monograph Authoritarianism on the front page: multimodal discourse and argumentation in times of multiple crises in Greece (2023, John Benjamins) as well as the co-editor of the “Critical perspectives on migration in discourse and communication” (2021, Studies in Communication Sciences; with J. Drzewiecka & S. Greco).
Email: d.serafis@rug.nl | X (Twitter): @DimitriSrf | Personal webpage: https://www.rug.nl/staff/d.serafis/?lang=en
Keynote:
“Hatred Rhetoric and Authoritarianism: Critical Perspectives on Multimodal Argumentation in the ‘Refugee Crisis’”
Crisis-ridden societies have witnessed a rise in authoritarian voices that have gradually become ‘mainstream’ (Mondon and Winter 2020) over the past years. Against this background, recent studies on authoritarian politics argue that there needs to be a particular focus on ‘authoritarian practices’ (Glasius 2018, 2023) and, most importantly, the discursive realization (Katsambekis 2023) of these practices that ‘normalize’ (Krzyżanowski 2020; Reyes 2020) authoritarian attitudes among the general public. In this respect, recent research (e.g., Demata 2017; Kreis 2017; Lorenzetti 2020) shows that authoritarian voices tend to strategically employ hatred against various minority groups to facilitate their overall positioning. Therefore, investigating how authoritarian practices are discursively advanced by subtle forms of hate speech appears necessary. In line with recent studies (see Serafis 2022; Serafis and Assimakopoulos 2023; Serafis and Boukala 2023; Serafis et al., 2023), I adopt an argumentative perspective to study implicit forms of hate speech, which Assimakopoulos et al. (2017: 4) define as “soft hate speech”; this variety of hate speech is “lawful but raises serious concerns in terms of intolerance and discrimination.” I aim to unveil the inferential lines of reasoning that emerge in multimodal artifacts such as newspaper front pages (Serafis 2023: 121-147) and ultimately justify hatred against migrant populations during the so-called ‘refugee crisis’. To achieve this, I integrate tools from multimodal critical discourse analysis (van Leeuwen 2008) and studies on inference in argumentation (Rigotti and Greco 2019).
