“Migration and the Myth of National Purity in Hate Speech”
with Dr. Veronika Bajt (Peace Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia)
22.5.2025, 16:15-17:45 CEST, Venue: KWZ 0.602, Göttingen und online via Zoom
This guest lecture is hosted by CeMig in cooperation with the research project MORE. To receive the link for online-participation, please fill in the form below. Abstract: "The obviously heterogeneous origins of Europe contradicts the traditional view of “our” history, which strives to isolate the European identity from its context and explain all subsequent developments by referring to exceptional and superior ancestors, who ultimately prevailed in the struggle against the retrograde threats of various Asian and African conquerors (Fontana 2003). National identities cannot be maintained based on complex and heterogeneous realities but require collective historical myths and representations of “us” and “them”, the Others, who can even be understood as Dangerous Others. Within the paranoia of nationalism, Dangerous Other brings fear of disease, destruction, pollution. Countless daily manifestations of racist hate speech and nationalist prejudice are a reminder of the continuing importance of racism and nationalism as social and political force in the contemporary global environment, for they remain a vibrant influence on current social and political movements and state policies. While migration law is adopting elements of criminal law, with migrants increasingly being treated as “symbolic assailants” (Jiang and Erez 2018), nationalism and racist hate speech spur threatening consequences for fundamental human rights. Contemporary racism and anti-immigrant prejudice are frequently disguised in allegedly patriotic safeguarding of the homeland, protection of the nation, “our” language, culture, women (Bajt 2015). Calls for integration of “us, Europeans” to preserve “our own identity” spread hostility, reject the idea of coexistence, equate refugees with Islamic terrorists and present them as a threat to “our nation” or “European values”. The multivocality of the concept of purity (in its relation to autochthonous-ness/native-ness) enables us to think about the construction of purity of the nation on the one hand, and the danger, impurity of the Other on the other. How should we think about the issue of migration in the modern age, in a world of increasingly technologically controlled physical borders on the one hand and the perspective of symbolic (non)belonging of certain people on the other? The lecture will offer a sociological definition of hate speech as anti-minority offensive (Leets 2002), discriminatory speech, and situate it within the nation-state’s nationalising practices."
Dr. Veronika Bajt holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Bristol, UK, and works as a researcher and project coordinator at the Peace Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is a member of the Presidency of the Slovenian Sociological Association, and was a guest lecturer at Masaryk University in Brno (CZ), University of Bristol (UK), and International University Institute for European Studies (Italy). She currently leads a research project Hate Speech in Contemporary Conceptualizations of Nationalism, Racism, Gender and Migration (Slovenian Research Agency, 2021-2025).
Here you can register for the guest lecture "Migration and the Myth of National Purity in Hate Speech" by Veronika Bajt