The ExId project offers a comprehensive analysis of the European far-right online landscape. Combining cutting-edge computational methods with in-depth qualitative analysis, the team will identify the many online far-right communities present in and across 7 European countries, map their relationships, and expose how these communities, through language and visual imagery, make some socio-political issues salient and construct particular collective identities (both in-groups such as “whites”, “Western civilization” or “Europe”, and out-groups such as “Muslims”, “feminists”, or “multiculturalists”). The team will offer a dynamic analysis of both the evolution of the European far-right online landscape, and its linguistic and visual content, exploring phenomena such as the impact of real-world events on websites’ content or circulation of linguistic/visual tropes across groups. Building on the specific, yet overlapping strengths of its collaborators in Exeter, Dublin, and Copenhagen, the project draws on diverse methodologies to offer a multidisciplinary analysis of the composite and rapidly moving European far-right movement. Through close collaboration between the three participating centres (each with a proven track-record of research on online extremist communications), this project will result in a range of academic publications, two new databases, and engagement with European policymakers and state officials. ExId will thus significantly enhance our understanding of four of the challenges identified in NORFACE’s call: shifting identities and representation, the evolving politics of threat, the democratisation of information, and the changing authority of institutions.

This project aims to answer the following question: how and why do different educational systems, and in particular their various modes of educational tracking and sorting, influence the formation and reproduction of social inequalities over the life course? While previous comparative research has identified effects of tracking on educational inequality, this project goes beyond the state of the art by exploring the underlying mechanisms from a dynamic life-course perspective, and by considering long-term consequences of tracking for final educational attainment and labour market outcomes. The project will focus on both inequality formation in general and inequality dynamics with respect to socioeconomic origin, gender and ethnicity in particular. This will be accomplished in a comparative research framework, comprising six European countries, which represent the prototypes of different tracked and comprehensive educational systems: Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK. Through a unique effort to harmonize high-quality life-course datasets from each of these countries, the project allows for an identification of differences in the dynamics of inequality formation in different institutional settings. The project will be organised as an international research network. It assembles experts in the field from each participating country, who will pursue an integrated research programme based on innovative methodology. By its novel approach of linking institutional characteristics of educational systems to dynamic processes in inequality formation, the project will make a significant contribution to the state of research and provide highly policy-relevant knowledge.

The ExId project offers a comprehensive analysis of the European far-right online landscape. Combining cutting-edge computational methods with in-depth qualitative analysis, the team will identify the many online far-right communities present in and across 7 European countries, map their relationships, and expose how these communities, through language and visual imagery, make some socio-political issues salient and construct particular collective identities (both in-groups such as “whites”, “Western civilization” or “Europe”, and out-groups such as “Muslims”, “feminists”, or “multiculturalists”). The team will offer a dynamic analysis of both the evolution of the European far-right online landscape, and its linguistic and visual content, exploring phenomena such as the impact of real-world events on websites’ content or circulation of linguistic/visual tropes across groups. Building on the specific, yet overlapping strengths of its collaborators in Exeter, Dublin, and Copenhagen, the project draws on diverse methodologies to offer a multidisciplinary analysis of the composite and rapidly moving European far-right movement. Through close collaboration between the three participating centres (each with a proven track-record of research on online extremist communications), this project will result in a range of academic publications, two new databases, and engagement with European policymakers and state officials. ExId will thus significantly enhance our understanding of four of the challenges identified in NORFACE’s call: shifting identities and representation, the evolving politics of threat, the democratisation of information, and the changing authority of institutions.

This project aims to answer the following question: how and why do different educational systems, and in particular their various modes of educational tracking and sorting, influence the formation and reproduction of social inequalities over the life course? While previous comparative research has identified effects of tracking on educational inequality, this project goes beyond the state of the art by exploring the underlying mechanisms from a dynamic life-course perspective, and by considering long-term consequences of tracking for final educational attainment and labour market outcomes. The project will focus on both inequality formation in general and inequality dynamics with respect to socioeconomic origin, gender and ethnicity in particular. This will be accomplished in a comparative research framework, comprising six European countries, which represent the prototypes of different tracked and comprehensive educational systems: Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK. Through a unique effort to harmonize high-quality life-course datasets from each of these countries, the project allows for an identification of differences in the dynamics of inequality formation in different institutional settings. The project will be organised as an international research network. It assembles experts in the field from each participating country, who will pursue an integrated research programme based on innovative methodology. By its novel approach of linking institutional characteristics of educational systems to dynamic processes in inequality formation, the project will make a significant contribution to the state of research and provide highly policy-relevant knowledge.