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Visiting Fellowship 2026/27

Ana Yara Postigo Fuentes, PhD

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Cultural Sciences at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, where I have been based since October 2022. My cumulative habilitation, on extremist narratives, humour, memes and political identity, is in its final stage at HHU.

In my doctoral thesis I studied video games, and esports in particular, as spaces for intercultural and multilingual encounters. Using a qualitative approach and discourse analysis, I developed a theory that sorts video games into distinct narrative types. It argues that learning happens through the player’s active engagement with those narratives. This interest in narratives has shaped my research ever since.

Today my work centres on extremist narratives: how they are built, how they circulate across digital platforms, parliamentary debate and popular culture, and how they relate to identity. Within the EU Horizon Europe project ARENAS (Analysis of and Responses to Extremist Narratives), I lead Work Package 2, which is responsible for the conceptual definition and methodological operationalisation of extremist narratives.

My connection to INZ goes back to my first visiting fellowship in 2024. Since then I have returned for several research stays, working closely with Kristina Pahor de Maiti Tekavčič, Dr. Darja Fišer and Dr. Jure Gašparič. This collaboration has brought together discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and contemporary history. It has produced joint frameworks, co-authored publications and shared events, among them the international workshop “Methodological Approaches to Extremist Narratives” and the Summer School “Agonality in Times of Crisis”. It has also led to a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship application with INZ as host institution and Dr. Darja Fišer as mentor.

Statement of interest:

The central aim of my stay in the second half of August 2027 is to prepare, together with colleagues from the Department of Political History and the Department of Digital Humanities, a renewed application to the Volkswagen Stiftung call “Transformation of Democracies”. Building on our previous proposal, we want to submit a stronger and more ambitious bid. It will draw on the complementarity between historical expertise on political transformation and digital, corpus-based methods for studying discourse. Working together on site during these two weeks will give us the best conditions to develop a competitive proposal.

Selected publications:

  • Postigo-Fuentes, Ana Yara. “Beneath the Laughter: Unpacking Extremist Narratives in Far-Right Memes” Digital Studies in Language and Literature, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1515/dsll-2026-0004
  • Postigo-Fuentes, A. Y., & Berna Alvarado, J. B. (2026). Economy, security and sovereignty: Comparative populist rhetoric of Le Pen, Meloni and Weidel on X. Languages, 11(8), 171. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages11080171
  • Castañeda, L., Viñoles-Cosentino, V., Postigo-Fuentes, A. Y., Herrero-Ramila, C., & Cachia, R. (2026). Educational empowerment and strategic guidance: A critical perspective on regional educational digital transformation. European Educational Research Journal, 25(4), 538–557. https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041251398083
  • Postigo-Fuentes, A. Y., Soler, S., & Pahor de Maiti Tekavčič, K. (2025). An interpretative framework for operationalization of extremist narrative analysis. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.17648873
  • Postigo-Fuentes, A. Y. (2025). Relational humor and identity framing in the “Virgin vs. Chad” meme format. Behavioral Sciences, 15(9), 1251. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15091251
  • Castañeda, L., Postigo-Fuentes, A. Y., Viñoles-Cosentino, V., Herrero-Ramila, C., & Cachia, R. (2025). Governing digital education in decentralised systems: Translating supranational frameworks into regional policy practice. Journal of Education Policy, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2025.2610833
  • Postigo Fuentes, A. Y., Hartmann, S., Kailuweit, R., & Ziem, A. (2024). Defining extremist narratives: A review of the current state of the art. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.13927429
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