‘Online Discourse on Ukrainians in the UK and Poland’ is a 2-year project (2023-2025) funded by the British Academy and led by Heriot-Watt University, with Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań as partners. The project is conducting a comparative study of online discourse on Ukrainians in the UK and Poland through corpus-assisted discourse studies. The study builds on previous British Academy-funded research on covert online hate speech against Ukrainians in Poland before the Russian invasion, also led by Heriot-Watt University (Understanding Hate to Counter Extremism, 2022). The project aims to contribute to understanding the mechanisms and strategies of othering, polarisation and covert hate speech in online environments, to improve monitoring of online communication and the development of effective counterspeech.

Based on large text collections, we use concordance, collocation and keyword analysis, together with sentiment analysis, to identify patterns and tropes related to Ukrainians in two different languages (English and Polish) and sociopolitical contexts, and to compare the sentiment associated with Ukrainians based on the above findings. While we would expect that the sentiment towards Ukrainians would now be (more) positive, our previous research has found that hateful strategies and tropes against this group persist despite their plight and the ensuing international outcry (Jaszczyk-Grzyb 2023).

The analysis will be complemented by two hybrid workshops in Poland and the UK which will take place in spring 2025. Our methodological approach will therefore be critically assessed by experts in the fields of corpus linguistics and hate studies. Such collaboration will also ensure the impact of the study beyond the publications and the workshops envisaged, and this would likely have wider appeal.

The research is also being presented in two conferences: