Dr. Catherine TEBALDI

Catherine is a Linguistic Anthropologist researching the “digital traditionalism” or the circulation, interpretation, and evolution of far-right ideas online and their social consequences. Some of her ongoing work includes:

• Multilingualism and the Motherland: In this project I explore practices and ideologies of multilingualism in far-right communities. While much previous literature on the right focuses on monolingualism and standard language ideologies, often assuming the right was culturally backwards and isolated, the contemporary far right is characterized by a great deal of digital and transnational connection. This project aims to help us understand the far right in two ways: 1) better understanding contemporary white nationalism by looking closely at their use and ideologies of language 2) trace the flows of far-right discourses, conspiracies and connections between communities and the evolutions of these discourses. Granola Nazis and Neoliberal Mystics: This project explores two communities of health and wellness influencers online.

• Granola Nazis, looks how daily practices of health and wellness become invested with far-right ecologism, from men doing a testosterone increasing “predator diet” to bitcoin libertarians rejecting vegetables as “fiat food”. The second, Neoliberal Mystics, looks at practices of “manifesting” or the “law of attraction” and how these communities are connected to far-right conspiracy practices. Together these projects look at how fascism becomes part of the everyday and infiltrates spaces seen as left, countercultural, or apolitical.

• Trump and Trumpism: With Katie Gaddini (Stanford and University College London, Sociology) I conduct social media analysis on a project exploring the futures of Trumpism and the right wing on-offline nexus, paying particular attention to Turning Point USA and conservative youth groups with large on and offline presences.

Previously Catherine was a research assistant at the Social Science Research institute of IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. She defended her dissertation “Alt-Education” in December 2021, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In her spare time she … just kidding she has none.