Year Ahead presenter Ashley Matheis talks about the use of online platforms to promote and mainstream extremist ideologies.

Ashley A. Mattheis is a PhD. Candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Doctoral Fellow with the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right. Her work brings together cultural studies, media studies, rhetorical criticism, through the lens of feminist theory to explore the material effects of cultural production and consumption. Along with her PhD., she is completing a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies and is interested in complementing publications with digital humanities projects. Her areas of inquiry include discourses of motherhood, victim blaming, and Far/Alt-Right extremism. These discourses contribute to popular, juridical, and cultural expectations of gender by normalizing notions of heteronormativity, unmarked whiteness, and gendered violence within the contemporary United States. Her dissertation. “Fierce Mamas: New Maternalism, Social Surveillance, and the Politics of Solidarity,” analyzes how motherhood discourses and mothering practices are used socially, and by women themselves, to divide women along multiple vectors of identity. Her recent publications focus on the use of online platforms to promote and mainstream extremist ideologies and divisive practices through discourses predicated on gendered logics. Post dissertation, she plans to study how women use motherhood as a mechanism of recruiting other women into extremist ideologies.

David Hofmann, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick, who presented his paper at the last Gregg Centre Annual Conference

David Hofmann is an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick. He is a research fellow with the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society, the Canadian Institute of Cyber Security, and the Muriel McQueen-Ferguson Centre for the Study of Family Violence. He has published in top scholarly journals on topics such as terrorist leadership, right-wing extremism in Canada, lone-actor terrorism, terrorist radicalization, terrorist networks, and transnational criminal networks. He has been consulted for his subject expertise by media, security, military, and policing organizations, particularly those in Atlantic Canada. He is currently co-editing a book entitled 'The Toronto 18 Terrorism Trials' with Kent Roach and Michael Nesbitt (expected publication in early 2021), and is working on finalizing a study of the extent and breadth of right-wing extremism in Atlantic Canada, which is part of a larger Public Safety Canada funded project led by Dr. Barbara Perry.