Damien Stankiewicz

DAMIEN STANKEIWICZ, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was awarded funding in April 2021 to aid research on “Virtual Patriots: Towards Online-Offline Ethnography of the French Far-Right.” Nine months of fieldwork research during the 2022-23 academic year were spent in a town in the Gard department of France where there has been an ongoing shift towards support for the far-right, including the town’s Rassemblement National mayor, who was reelected in 2020. This project, focusing on relationship of residents’ support for the far-right and their media practices, was methodologically hybrid: Face-to-face fieldwork focused on everyday life in the town and local organizations to understand whether and how politics were relevant, and how people understand local political contexts and shifts, while online ethnography tracked far-right Twitter (X) accounts, telegram channels, and a chat room. The goal of this hybrid approach was to understand whether and how political participation differed in face-to-face versus online (anonymous) contexts. Main findings of this research include: Reluctance among residents to disclose affiliation with or support for the far-right; increasing political fissures in town partly due to policies enacted by the mayor, including, for example, privileging white French-owned small businesses over non-white French businesses; growth in digital political engagement among older adults in Beaucaire, coinciding with polarization and more extreme political views; and increasing influence of U.S.-based far- and extreme-right political discourse on French language social media and apps.