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Catherine Tebaldi

Postdoctoral researcher

Department

Department of Humanities

Postal Address

Université du Luxembourg
Maison des Sciences Humaines
11, Porte des Sciences
L-4366 Esch-sur-Alzette

Campus Office

MSH, E02 25-440

Telephone

(+352) 46 66 44 4925

Profile
Research
Teaching
Talks
Public Facing Research
Publications

Catherine is a Linguistic Anthropologist researching the “digital traditionalism” or the circulation, interpretation, and evolution of far-right ideas online and their social consequences. Some of her ongoing work includes:

Multilingualism and the Motherland: In this project I explore practices and ideologies of multilingualism in far-right communities. While much previous literature on the right focuses on monolingualism and standard language ideologies, often assuming the right was culturally backwards and isolated, the contemporary far right is characterized by a great deal of digital and transnational connection. This project aims to help us understand the far right in two ways: 1) better understanding contemporary white nationalism by looking closely at their use and ideologies of language 2) trace the flows of far-right discourses, conspiracies and connections between communities and the evolutions of these discourses. Granola Nazis and Neoliberal Mystics: This project explores two communities of health and wellness influencers online.
Granola Nazis, looks how daily practices of health and wellness become invested with far-right ecologism, from men doing a testosterone increasing “predator diet” to bitcoin libertarians rejecting vegetables as “fiat food”. The second, Neoliberal Mystics, looks at practices of “manifesting” or the “law of attraction” and how these communities are connected to far-right conspiracy practices. Together these projects look at how fascism becomes part of the everyday and infiltrates spaces seen as left, countercultural, or apolitical.
Trump and Trumpism: With Katie Gaddini (Stanford and University College London, Sociology) I conduct social media analysis on a project exploring the futures of Trumpism and the right wing on-offline nexus, paying particular attention to Turning Point USA and conservative youth groups with large on and offline presences.

Previously Catherine was a research assistant at the Social Science Research institute of IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. She defended her dissertation “Alt-Education” in December 2021, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In her spare time she … just kidding she has none.

Last updated on: Thursday, 15 September 2022

Conservativism and the Cultural Politics of Education: Catherine’s dissertation Alt-education explored conservative and far right public, online, and home education. How do the far right educate? How do discourses of education serve broader anti-government or anti-egalitarian agendas?
White Nationalist Women’s Language: Gender, race and language in social media, especially concerned with the normalization and aestheticization of far-right politics.
Digital Traditionalism: How are far right ideas and deeply conservative politics showing up in health, wellness, and beauty spaces? How do online movements like cottagecore or tradwives dedicated to tradition vehiculate, aestheticize, sensualize, ideologies of gender, race, and nature?
Online-Offline Nexus: Developing blended fieldwork, digital ethnography and data analysis, mixed methods. How can digital methods and data analytics to deepen and extend linguistic anthropological research as well as qualitative more broadly?

Last updated on: 15 Sep 2022

Catherine Teaches digital media analysis, research design, and ethics workshops for researchers, BA and MA students in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and sociology.

She also teaches writing for publication for PhD students.

Last updated on: 15 Sep 2022

White Economics and Bitcoin Cowboys, ICS 2022, Prague
Panel organized by Mi-Cha Flubacher, University of Vienna.

Critical Beauty, or what my mom could teach sociolinguists
Panel organized by Dr. Katy Highet and Peter Browning, University College London.

Trump and Trumpism – The future of Trumpism and the end of the world, UCL Institute for Advanced Studies, London
(talk organizer) with Dr. Katie Gaddini

Tradwives and Truth Warriors, SLA 2022 Boulder, CO.
(Panel Organizer) with Dr. Dominika Baran, Nationalism and the Anti-Gender register.

White Nationalist Women’s Language, AAA 2021, Baltimore, MD.
SLA student Prize Panel

Videos of talks can be found at https://umass.academia.edu/CatherineTebaldi

Last updated on: 15 Sep 2022

Catherine is also committed to engaged and public facing research, and a member of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism and the Global Far Right Analysis Network. Her news articles can be found here: https://www.radicalrightanalysis.com/author/catherine-tebaldi/

She began a feminist digital research network, and also played a Dolly Parton impersonator in an art film shown by Johanna Maj Schmidt in Germany and Belgium as part of the “Fugitive Knowledges” project organized by Sibo Kanobana and Alfonso Del Percio.

Last updated on: 15 Sep 2022