DiGiTRAD – Digital Traditionalism

In 2023, Luxembourgish newspaper RTL asked “Is there a far right in Luxembourg?”. By 2024 the populist right party ADR had 12% of the vote in national and European elections with a platform calling for a return to tradition and an end to “gender gaga” and “woke” craziness of gay rights, feminism, and multiculturalism. This language directly echoed the right fringes of Swiss youth politics, campaigning against “woke wahnsinn” and “gender-gaga”. In both countries, which are usually considered to be harbors of liberal democracy, social media campaigns were produced targeting youth in which language became a central issue in politics opposing modernity and equality to gendered traditionalism and nationalism. Responding to the pressing need for new knowledge and robust empirical evidence about everyday extremisms or the role of media in the banalization and circulation of far-right ideologies into spaces, discourses, and places not typically associated in the far right, DiGiTRAD explores how banal metapragmatics – discussion of how we should talk, how we should spell, or gendered language– become sites for a reactionary metapolitics appealing to youth, a battle for tradition against modernity in which the smallest asterisk (gender stern) is a weapon of the woke. Expanding the PIs work on language, gender and digital nationalism, through a mixed-methods approach integrating digital and non-digital data collection methods, DIGITRAD generates two new large composite datasets for new theory in the intersections of Peircean semiotics and media studies in circulation and mediatization, and relationships between metapragmatics and metapolitics. To advance scholarship in discourse studies (incl. sociolinguistics), media and the interdisciplinary field of far-right studies, it will produce 3 papers in top-ranked journals, a major international conference, workshops, and a 2-year lectures series. It will contribute to the PI’s application to ERC grants, while building the profile of media studies teaching and research at the University of Luxembourg to further support other ECR researchers including 2 student assistants. DiGiTRAD also engages in public outreach activities raising the youth’s awareness for the role of anti-gender discourses as gateways for anti-liberal and anti-modern political radicalization.