Hate speech and narrative identities: from Michel Foucault's analysis of the order of discourse to the formation of citizenship as a widespread educational system in onlife


Abstract:

This paper relies on the hermeneutics of Michel Foucault's thought to explore the structure of hate speech and identify how procedures of exclusion operate in the formation of online and offline discourse. Taking this framework as a starting point, we observe how the digital world has transformed the structure of discourse by overturning the procedures of exclusion and control through a ‘technology of the self’ that operates, with its affordances, to increase information, comments, and sharing through the procedures of inclusion. This reversal has facilitated the ‘constitution’ of hate speech that becomes the effect of a dysregulated context”. This analysis takes place within the description of the epistemic rupture and paradigm shift that onlife has brought about on the discourse of society. In this framework, the implementation of onlife Citizenship paths (Pasta, 2023, Rivoltella, 2020) becomes pregnant to the extent that it stimulates students to become active, responsible and aware protagonists and producers of online discourse.