This is a hybrid talk taking place at Aston University and hosted on Teams. A link to join online will be sent out on the day of the event.
Speaker: Jenna Elliott (PhD candidate, AIFL)
Abstract:
According to the Violence Project, mass shootings in the United States have become more frequent and deadlier over time (“Key Findings”). Previous literature on threat assessment has noted two warning behaviors that can occur prior to mass shootings: leakage, when a person communicates to a third party about the intent to carry out an attack, and identification, when an individual associates themselves with others who have carried out similar attacks (O’Toole, 2000). Mass shooters have been found to be motivated by their desire for fame (O’Toole, 2000; Bushman, 2018), and some will distribute manifestos prior to their attacks detailing their motivations and the ideologies; these texts can contain examples of mass shooters identifying with previous perpetrators and highlight the interconnectedness of these manifestos. There is currently a lack of research examining the linguistic and ideological similarities in these manifestos. By using corpus linguistics to identify linguistic trends and critical discourse analysis to examine the underlying ideologies, I aim to explore the intertextuality of mass shooters’ manifestos. The texts will be selected based on the following criteria: the author of the text carried out a mass shooting event following the publication of the text, the text was publicly available, and the text included content related to the subsequent mass shooting event. This research should, ultimately, help illuminate the consequences of allowing the texts authored by mass shooters to be published publicly and how the manifestos of earlier mass shooters have impacted later mass shooters. As the research is ongoing, the presentation will focus on previous literature and the methodology of the proposed study.
References:
Bushman, B. (2018). Narcissism, fame seeking, and mass shootings. American Behavioral
Scientist. 62(2), pp. 229-241.
