When I was hired by Northampton almost five years ago as their first medieval historian, I never expected that I would end up researching very contemporary history! But one of the rewarding things about working within a small, friendly department is finding opportunities for collaboration in unexpected places. So I found myself swapping ideas with Paul Jackson and Dan Jones about the Searchlight Archive and about histories of fascism more broadly, which helped inform the development of my Medieval Chivalry and its Afterlives undergraduate module and led to the publication of an article on teaching chivalry in an age of white supremacy. Since then, I have developed a new project which I am pleased to say has been awarded funding from the University of Northampton’s Research Impact and Engagement Fund.
| On the social media platform X, a wide range of other accounts fetishize the Middle Ages in ways that I argue act as a mode of accessing white supremacist discourse. On the surface, these online spaces may appear like innocuous providers of historical memes and inspirational images, but even cursory exploration takes web-users into a complex network of extremist content where users scaffold their right wing political radicalism with surprisingly detailed historical material. I propose that the extreme right’s preoccupation with medieval tropes provides a vital touchstone for understanding radicalisation that particularly targets white boys and men with emotional appeals to their gendered identity as well as to their ethnonationalist and socio-economic grievances. The extreme right employment of the medieval past generates radicalised ‘emotionology’ (the way a society or group thinks about emotions and their expression) in ways that attract and convert target audiences with the promise of emotional liberty and the embrace of extremism. This project will explore how these concepts are expressed in online social media spaces, an area of research I am currently working on as an expert in medieval history and gender studies. It will use a research assistant to help develop a wider source base and use this to develop Impact activities around this research. Impact activities will be based on a set of training activities and other engagement activities for UK and US professionals that will impactfully shape practitioners’ approaches to online radicalisation. |
My research assistant, Siobhan Hyland, has already begun work on data gathering, and in the early summer I’ll be running both an in person and online workshop on these themes for practitioners. I’m excited to develop this new strand of my research, and to produce work that can have meaningful social impact!
Dr Rachel Moss is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Northampton.
HISTORY AT NORTHAMPTON 