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Javier Toscano

Javier Toscano

Defending the “homeland”: Mapping the digital patterns on the far right’s programmatic (mis)representation of migrants

This study focuses on the current audiovisual forms in which migrants are represented in far-right digital communication networks. It seeks to outline the semantic and political functions these representations create within specific communities of practice, and to describe the digital operations and schemes implemented by these agents. An analysis of specific social media practices, user routines, digital content exchanges, platform interconnections and paratextual interactions aims to document how far-right influencers attempt to circumvent discursive and AI-supported controls and other forms of user-behavior alerts while attempting to reinforce marginal opinions and to shift fringe testimonies to the mainstream, much too often successfully.

Main Research Topics

  • Visual Sociology
  • Media Studies
  • Migrant Studies
  • Political Philosophy
  • Philosophy of Technology

Curriculum Vitae

2020–2021, Fellow researcher, APRA Foundation, Berlin

2017–2020, Research Associate, Technische Universtität Chemnitz, Germany

2014–2016, Postdoctoral Fellow, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

2012, Postdoctoral Fellow, Université Paris IV: Sorbonne, France

Lectures and Publications

Toscano, J. (2014). Un mundo sin Dios, pueblo de fantasmas. La imagen dialéctica: recurso para una semiología radical. Una lectura de Walter Benjamin [A World without God, a Ghost Town. The Dialectical Image as a Resource for a Radical Semiology. Reading Walter Benjamin’s work], Mexico: UNAM, 254 pp.

Toscano, J. (Forthcoming). Parkour’s interactional organization. The role of media, symbolic forms and non-representational figurations. Culture and Organization.

Toscano, J. (2021). Violence as Expression: Leibniz and the Baroque as key sources for Walter Benjamin’s Political Thought. LoSguardo, 32 (1), 197-216. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5838292

Toscano, J. (2020). Parkour as a visual urban subculture: An aesthetic understanding of its performative scope. Liminalities: Journal of Permormative Studies, 16 (4), 1-21. http://liminalities.net/16-4/parkour.pdf

Toscano, J., (2019). Transcoding identity: Assemblages between man and machine beyond the cyborg archetype – a semiotic route. Semiotica, 226, 49-71. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2017-0029

Montanari, G., and Toscano, J., (2017). Re-shaping the political field one visual fragment at a time. The Tunisian conundrum. TripleC: Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 15 (2), 726-739. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v15i2.806

“Deconstructing an algorithm. Intentionalities and socio-computing infrastructures”, at the Philosophy in Informatics VI Conference, Warsaw University of Technology, 16-17 December 2021.

“Intentionalities of Code: Historical Practices and Devices. A Philosophical Account”, at the 6th International Conference on the History and Philosophy of Computing, Zürich, Switzerland, 27-29 October 2021 (+ info at https://hapoc2021.sciencesconf.org/).

“Towards a New Critique of Information. The Symbolic Structure of our Technological Drive” at The Society for Philosophy and Technology Conference, Université Catholique de Lille, France, 28-30 June 2021 (+ info at https://www.2021spt.com/).

“The Migrant Livelihood. Wanderings, hyperbolic threats and symbolic erasures in the name of democracy”, at the IAPSS World Congress, Democracy, Identity and Power, 11-14 May 2021.

Javier Toscano

Fellow at CAIS from April to October 2022