Counterspeech: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Countering Dangerous Speech - Paperback

by Stefanie Ullmann (Editor), Marcus Tomalin (Editor)

This volume looks at the forms and functions of counterspeech as well as what determines its effectiveness and success from multidisciplinary perspectives. Counterspeech is in line with international human rights and freedom of speech and it can be a much more powerful tool against dangerous and toxic speech than blocking and censorship.

Author Biography

Stefanie Ullmann is a linguist and postdoctoral research associate at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her research interests include the use of language in politics and media discourse as well as forms and effects of harmful language in online discourse. She is the author of several journal publications on combatting and mitigating digital harms. Her book Discourses of the Arab Revolutions (2022) examines the power and functions of language in sociopolitical conflicts.

Marcus Tomalin has been a member of the Machine Intelligence Laboratory in the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University since 1998. He has published extensively on speech recognition, speech synthesis, machine translation, and dialogue systems, as well as various topics in the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics, with a recurrent focus on the interconnections between mathematics, logic, and syntactic theory. He has a particular interest in the ethical and social impact of language-based AI systems, and he teaches ethics to undergraduates and postgraduates who are studying philosophy, computer science, and information engineering.