Far-right boundary construction towards the “other”: Visual communication of Danish People’s Party on social media

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Documents

  • Full Text

    Final published version, 16.4 MB, PDF document

This paper explores how images are used in online far-right political communication to create distinct groups of “otherness.” Focusing on the Danish People's Party, we look at how symbolic boundaries are constructed through images to emphasize an exclusive conception of the nation and its citizens, who need protection from the threatening “others.” In order to understand the global rise of the far right, scholars of social movements and digital media have called for new research on how visual images serve the mainstreaming of extremist and nationalist beliefs online. We look at images communicated by the Danish People's Party on their Facebook page, exploring how digital images visually communicate the party's slogan of “Safety and trust” (in Danish: “Tryghed og tillid”). With a focus on boundary construction, we present a multimodal visual analysis of 1120 images posted by the party from 2012 to 2020. The data shows how the party constructs an imaginary of Danishness through an exclusionary impermeable boundary construction of a trusted in-group's values and traditions in opposition to culturally distinct “others.”
Original languageEnglish
JournalBritish Journal of Sociology
Volume73
Issue number5
Pages (from-to)985-1005
ISSN0007-1315
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

Number of downloads are based on statistics from Google Scholar and www.ku.dk


No data available

ID: 320173374