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Migration phenomena characterised by a large influx of populations can easily question our conception of territories and social relations. Since this conception is part and parcel of our identity, migration has the power to trigger political discourses on identity issues. One such occasion has indeed been unravelling lately, especially since the summer of 2015, with the arrival in the European Union (henceforth EU) of migrants from a variety of places, and in particular from regions in conflict, such as Syria, Libya or Iraq, countries under totalitarian regimes, such as Erythrea, as well as countries with high levels of poverty, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh. As a result, Europe has been politically and socially shaken: photos of thousands of migrants roaming across Europe have made the news, and such media images have been instrumentalised to serve different, often far-right, political agendas.

As already hinted at in the previous chapter, the C.O.N.T.A.C.T. project covered two main strands of research: the expression of hate speech and its perception. To these ends, a multi-method approach was adopted, encompassing different types of data. In this chapter, we will outline the shared procedures of data collection and analysis in relation to both the production data, i.e. online comments to news reports, and the perceptual data, i.e. interviews.

Having outlined the common methodological perspective that C.O.N.T.A.C.T. partners adopted for both research strands of the project, it is now time to turn to a general discussion of the results obtained. To this end, this chapter will focus on the analysis of the comments corpora that were compiled at the first stage of our investigation; through the application of different techniques and against the background of various theoretical standpoints, the following sections touch on topics of central importance for the discourse-analytic discussion of hate speech, broadly construed.

The present chapter, much like the previous one, comprises a series of short sections, each focusing on a particular aspect arising from the interview discussions. The analyses adopt predominantly thematic qualitative approaches embedded within various theoretical perspectives and are meant to explore the ways in which young people perceive hate speech and matters associated with it. Again, it should be noted that even though each section is based on a particular national setting, the overall argumentation is of relevance to other contexts and to the wider discussion of the specific phenomenon in focus.

The present volume has explored a number of themes that are inextricably linked to discriminatory discourse.