Transnationalising the anti-public sphere: Australian anti-publics and extremist online media

Abstract

In this chapter, the author argues that the traditional framing of far-right extremist discourse in terms of race-based nationalism, while highly relevant, is not of itself sufficient to explain recent developments in extremist discourse. Such discourse has proliferated and changed in nature in the era of online media and in particular social media. To encompass these developments, the author uses the term ‘anti-publics’, to describe how extremist groups increasingly position themselves in counter-hegemonic opposition to democratic processes more generally, including normative ‘public sphere’ processes of deliberation, rules of evidence, egalitarianism, mutuality, reciprocity, and so on. The..