This open access book reports on research carried out as part of the European Union co-funded C.O.N.T.A.C.T. project which targeted hate speech and hate crime across a number of EU member states. It showcases the bearing that discourse analytic research can have on our understanding of this phenomenon that is a growing global cause for concern. Although 'hate speech' is often incorporated in legal and policy documents, there is no universally accepted definition, which in itself warrants research into how hatred is both expressed and perceived. The research project synthesises discourse analytic and corpus linguistics techniques, and presents its key findings here. The focus is especially on online comments posted in reaction to news items that could trigger discrimination, as well as on the folk perception of online hate speech as revealed through semi-structured interviews with young individuals across the various partner countries.

A pathologist is asked to lie about a boy killed on government orders; a sister tries to make peace with the parents of the white American girl her brother has murdered; a gangster makes his posthumous lament: Trinidad in all its social tumult is ever present in these stories, but so too are the lives of those with private griefs: a woman mourning the still-birth of her baby; a young mother with cancer facing her mortality. Millar's characters come intensely alive at points of crisis, of existential threat.The stories in this collection range wide: across different ethnic communities; across rural and urban settings; across the moneyed elite (and illicit new wealth) and the poor scrabbling for survival; locals and expatriates; the certainties of rational knowledge and the mysteries of the unseen and the uncanny. Different locations in Trinidad are brought to the reader through a precise and sensuous mapping of the country's fauna and flora.Characters thread their way through different stories, but what ties the collection together is Sharon Millar's distinctively personal voice: cool, unsentimental and empathetic. If irony is the only way to inscribe contemporary Trinidad, there is also room for the possibility of redemption.