Combatting Alt-Right Radicalisation through Classics

Undergraduate students Isabelle Meadows-Gibb, Kate Nolting and George Simons were part of the 2025 Modern Classics cohort. They designed the following Applied Classics podcast project to reclaim ancient sources from alt-right misuses and deploy them – via the medium of gaming – to foster better-informed engagement with Classical antiquity and combat alt-right radicalisation. They describe their project below:

Our project was inspired by what we had learnt about misuses of ancient sources in alt-right context. We designed it with the following goals in mind:

• Prevent, raise awareness and critically engage with people affected by alt-right radicalization
• Produce educational resources which promote strong memory retention and a greater understanding of history from a humanitarian perspective
• Create experiences true to classical history that create foundations which reclaim antiquity from misuses and appropriations

Each member of the team designed a game that addressed one aspect of alt-right radicalisation or extreme politics, using ancient history as the game’s basis and enabling players to explore political and ethical decision-making in immersive ways. For more information, please listen to the presentation below:

You can read more about our project in this blog by Isabelle Meadows-Gibb: Gaming Antiquity to Critique Modern Ideologies; and also in this blog by Kate Nolting: Gaming the Battle of Alesia: a lesson in ethics.