Jennifer Evans was invited to present her work on social media and digital activism at the University of Oklahoma Humanities Forum’s Fascism, America, and Human Rights symposium November 12th. Together with distinguished colleagues specializing in the history of authoritarianism, she provided a commentary on how historical research might aid us in understanding the social make-up of white supremacist groups. Her paper centered on far-right groups in the United States and Germany and analyzed how one might use Facebook analytics to identify and make better sense of the way they conceptualize their struggle by grounding their work in specific — and very different –symposium to history. Evans argues that social media is a potent, if fraught, source into how memory is constructed and how group identity is forged. For these reasons, it is important for historians to lend our tools to help analyze and interpret these online texts.
Symposium participants will continue to develop this work and present variations of their papers in Madrid in the spring, at the Association for Memory Studies annual conference.