Narrative analysis to the problem of information extremism in the student environment

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Abstract

The article analyzes students’ narratives by the method of focus groups on the problem of attitudes towards young women who left for Syria. The authors attempted to reconstruct the girls’ everyday discourse of “talking to a stranger on the Internet and going to Syria through interviews and focus-group communication”. In the context of narrative analysis, the authors see two levels of the problem: the micro-level – the ability to identify the degree of sensitivity to the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism through attitudes to the practical actions of specific girls who have already gone to Syria. Macro-level – “intergenerational conflict” or “intergenerational rift”. The result of intergenerational conflict in North Caucasus societies is often a religiously-extremist way of behaving to adults who do not share their “excessive immersion in Islam” to the detriment of traditional normative values. The analysis of youth narratives concerning the “departed” can also serve as an explanatory model for the response to a broader problem, namely the development of intergenerational dynamics in the context of a clash of values between the traditional culture of local societies and Islamic fundamentalism. In this two-level perspective, we see the prospect of further research into the problem of extremism in North Caucasian societies. In this article, we have designated the macro level as the “background site”. In our reconstruction of the everyday discourse of university students on the problem of “girls leaving for Syria”, we came to the following conclusions. The evaluations revealed the admissibility of sharing the spouse’s fate as an attributive understanding of marital duty within the framework of Islamic ideology. In the opinion of female students, the loneliness of girls, domestic violence, and the search for a “real man” can also serve as a possible decision for young women to communicate online with a stranger. The relevance of the problem of analyzing narratives is the need to comprehend the palette of opinions of a part of the youth audience, which is not considered to be young people in the “risk zone”.