Dr Eszter Szenes is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University, Vienna, Austria and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Resilience and Security (CGRS) at Norwich University, Northfield, Vermont, USA. She was seconded to Norwich University's Peace and War Center for two years before returning to CEU.
She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Sydney, Australia. Prior to joining CEU in 2020, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Research Collegium for Language in Changing Society (RECLAS), University of Jyväskylä in Finland (2019-2020) and was based at the Learning Centre, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) and Registrar Portfolio, University of Sydney (2013-2019). She spent five months on research leave in Canada, including Vantage College, The University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, BC, Canada. She also lectured and tutored at the Department of Linguistics and the Business Program Unit (former Faculty of Economics and Business) at USyd. Her research and teaching was focusing on embedding disciplinary and professional literacy development into the curriculum and exploring the knowledge practices of critical thinking and reflective writing in a range of academic disciplines. She is affiliated with the Sydney Centre for Language Research and the LCT Centre for Knowledge-Building at The University of Sydney.
Her research draws on the theoretical foundations and methodologies of Systemic Functional Linguistics, Legitimation Code Theory and Corpus Linguistics. She is writing a book titled The Language of Business Reasoning and Decision-Making: Analysing Student Writing in Business Higher Education to be published by Bloomsbury; also co-editing with Dr Namala Tilakaratna a book titled Demystifying Critical Reflection: Improving Pedagogy and Practice with Legitimation Code Theory to be published by Routledge.
Dr Szenes's mission is to take her training in linguistics and sociology into her interdisciplinary collaborations, research and teaching. Her current research project funded by the European Commissions' Horizon2020 framework investigates the linguistic anatomy of radicalization strategies in online extremist propaganda and information tactics within disinformation campaigns. Her most recent work investigates the links between climate change and violent extremism, ecofascism and Russian disinformation campaigns on Twitter.
Research interests: radicalization and violent extremism; ecofascism; disinformation / information warfare; critical thinking / critical reflection; disciplinary, digital and critical literacies