Welcome to the first news post for Weaponised Pasts!

Weaponised Pasts is an interdisciplinary research project grant funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

People use interpretations of the past to justify antagonistic othering, which can undermine democratic discourse, cause distress and even translate into violence offline, a process known as heritage-based hostility. Despite its substantial societal impact, little is known about the interplay of factors that lead to the diffusion of hostile interpretations of the past online. We will be using newspapers and social media data, and a series of behavioural experiments, to study how content-focused factors interact with context-related aspects of the communication on social media to predict the emergence, transformation and spread of this heritage-based hostility. Learn more about our research objectives here.

The project represents a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh and the University of Trento, and will break new ground methodologically and empirically by combining approaches from heritage studies, cognitive psychology and cultural evolution for the first time. The project is led by PI Dr Chiara Bonacchi, with CIs co-leadership from Dr Zachary Horne and Dr Alberto Acerbi, and the primary research is conducted by Dr John-Paul Martindale. Learn more about the project team here.

During the project, we will be maintaining an active presence on this website and on social media to keep you informed about our work and opportunities to learn more. If you are interested in keeping up-to-date, please subscribe here and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and BlueSky.

We look forward to telling you about our formal launch event next week!