Ashley Mattheis to Lecture at King's College London

Ashley A. Mattheis, PhD. Candidate in the Department of Communication has won a UNC College of Arts & Sciences Strategic Partnership Award. This award will allow Ms. Mattheis to visit The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and the Department of War Studies at King’s College London in early Summer 2019 to present her research on Far/Alt-Right Women’s Recruiting Narratives. The talk will be focused on her recent publication, “Shieldmaidens of Whiteness: (Alt)Maternalism and Women Recruiting for the Far/Alt-Right,” in the Journal for Deradicalization. This article was developed from research presented at the 2018 Vox/Pol Conference on Violent Extremism, Terrorism, and The Internet: Present and Future Trends in Amsterdam, Netherlands in August 2018 sponsored by the EU.

In addition to her individual research presentation, Ms. Mattheis will be visiting the ICSR to present a collaborative research report on women’s recruiting narratives in Far/Alt-Right and Islamic State texts with ICSR Fellow and Doctoral Candidate, Mr. Charlie Winter. This collaboration represents a preliminary foray into studying gender as an ideological mechanism of transfer between extremist groups and mainstream socio-political contexts as well as a limited, initial foray into comparative study of women’s participation in extremism. The collaboration began after Mr. Winter’s visit to UNC in the Fall of 2018 to present his research, hosted by the Department of Communication and the Curriculum in Peace, War & Defense. Mr. Winter’s visit was also generously funded through the College Strategic Partnership program which importantly allowed time for in-depth conversations enabling this collaboration to develop.
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“Shieldmaidens of Whiteness: (Alt)Maternalism and Women Recruiting for the Far/Alt-Right” can be read open access here: http://journals.sfu.ca/jd/index.php/jd/article/view/177.

For more information about this research or the comparative research collaboration, contact Ashley Mattheis (mattheis@email.unc.edu). Additional information on Ms. Mattheis’ research, activities, and dissertation can be found at http://aamattheis.com.