In the 23rd episode of Battle Rhythm, Stef and Steve discuss the CDSN’s Covid Response Conference held online this week, the new NSA ie Network for Strategic Analysis and CAF readiness. Stef speaks with Year Ahead presenter Ashley Matheis [25:00] about the use of online platforms to promote and mainstream extremist ideologies. For our Feature Interview this week Steve catches up with WIIS Chair and security scholar extraordinaire Aisha Ahmad [38:00]. In this week’s R&R segment Steve recommends:
1. Where Eagles Dare
2. Community
3. Run Silent, Run Deep

Host Biographies:

• Stéfanie von Hlatky: Associate Professor of political studies at Queen’s University and the former Director of the Queen’s Centre for International and Defence Policy (CIDP). Her research focuses on NATO, armed forces, military interventions, and defence policy. Fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.
• Stephen M. Saideman: Paterson Chair in International Affairs, as well as Director of the Canadian Defence and Security Network – Réseau Canadien Sur La Défense et la Sécurité, and Professor of International Affairs at Carleton University. Fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

Guest Biographies:

• Ashley A. Mattheis: 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.
• Aisha Ahmad: An Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Co-Director of the Islam and Global Affairs Initiative at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. In 2012, she was a fellow at the Belfer Center on Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her work explores the political economy of Islamist power in weak and failed states. She specializes in International Relations and International Security and has conducted fieldwork on conflict dynamics in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Lebanon, Mali, and Kenya. Her 2017 book with Oxford University Press, titled “Jihad & Co.: Black Markets and Islamist Power”, explores the economic drivers of these complex security crises.

Find detailed show notes here: www.cdsn-rcds.com/battlerhythm