Dr Etaywe is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and an award-winning forensic linguistics and communication scholar - a recipient of the VC’s ECR Award & M.A.K. Halliday Prize for Outstanding Research in Applied Linguistics.

Alongside his focus on violent extremism and cyber-terrorist threatening and inciting communication, he also investigates positive discourses, including Positive Environmental Journalism, eco-cultural identification and affiliation, digital activist discourse, and the semiotics of peace, compassion, and empathy in strategic communication used by resistance and social justice activism movements. This dual focus critiques manipulative tactics and fosters strategies for transformative change. His work aligns with UNSDG 16 - which aims to promote just, peaceful and inclusive societies - employing a dual approach bridging peacebuilding and counter-extremism through linguistic analysis.

Etaywe has led a "national research project" (funded by the Australian Department of Home Affairs) on "countering violent extremism" that "supports policy and practice in Australia," using AI-enhanced corpus-based forensic linguistics for CVE that is fulled by disinformation, polarisation, and grievance. Etaywe's forensic linguistic analyses serve crucial purposes, including: (i) assisting investigators in establishing evidence of crimes and their moral and social motives, (ii) enabling a deeper understanding of the criminal nature of the language used, negotiated social affiliations and (dis)cohesion, threats, and incitement to hatred and discrimination, (iii) maximising intelligence yield, and (iv) linguistic criminal profiling. He also explores the acts of manipulation, victim blaming, and discrediting, as well as the strategies of persuasion, argumentation and legitimisation, to offer new insights into underlying mechanisms in language use.

Consistently pushing the boundaries of interdisciplinary research at the intersection of language, communication, law, security and intelligence, Dr Etaywe employs an innovative toolkit and disruptive research methodologies. His approach leverages social semiotics, rhetoric analysis, NLP, AI tools, as well as discourse and corpus-analytic techniques. 

Etaywe is a published author whose work appears in top journals such as Language in Society, Discourse & Society, Discourse & Communication, and in Routledge’s textbooks on online deviance. He is currently authoring a Cambridge Element on the "Forensic Linguistics of Terrorist Incitement through Stance and Disinformation." He has also co-edited a special issue on the semiotics of peace, compassion and empathy (John Benjamins) and received the Top Paper Award from the International Environmental Communication Association at COCE2025.