Year Ahead presenter Ashley Matheis talks about the use of online platforms to promote and mainstream extremist ideologies.

Ashley A. Mattheis is a PhD. Candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Doctoral Fellow with the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right. Her work brings together cultural studies, media studies, rhetorical criticism, through the lens of feminist theory to explore the material effects of cultural production and consumption. Along with her PhD., she is completing a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies and is interested in complementing publications with digital humanities projects. Her areas of inquiry include discourses of motherhood, victim blaming, and Far/Alt-Right extremism. These discourses contribute to popular, juridical, and cultural expectations of gender by normalizing notions of heteronormativity, unmarked whiteness, and gendered violence within the contemporary United States. Her dissertation. “Fierce Mamas: New Maternalism, Social Surveillance, and the Politics of Solidarity,” analyzes how motherhood discourses and mothering practices are used socially, and by women themselves, to divide women along multiple vectors of identity. Her recent publications focus on the use of online platforms to promote and mainstream extremist ideologies and divisive practices through discourses predicated on gendered logics. Post dissertation, she plans to study how women use motherhood as a mechanism of recruiting other women into extremist ideologies.