Online social media as discursive opportunity structure for attacks against refugee housing facilities

The purpose of this project is to study the interplay between internet forum discussions with racist and anti-refugee content and attacks directed at refugee housing facilities. First, the project explores how discourses on immigrants and refugees are constructed in extreme-right online forums, and how such discourses change over time and diffuse to a broader online public. The analysis combines qualitative text analysis with social network analysis and powerful data mining techniques such as topic modeling. Second, the project studies how online public discourses shape the targets and the temporal and spatial patterns of attacks against refugee housing facilities. Here we primarily use a Qualitative Comparative Analysis on a sample of Swedish municipalities to identify the effects of various local contextual conditions and media discours