I am an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. My current research focuses on the connection between social media and contentious politics. One project, for example, examines how the interaction of social and traditional media helped foster backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement, particularly the rhetoric of “Blue Lives Matter”. Another project examines how online speech contributes to religious-nationalist violence in India. More generally, my research explores the links between media, culture, and social unrest, as well as how to better measure and understand culture using digital data, computational techniques, and generative AI. My earlier research focused on political violence in Afghanistan, labor migration from Pakistan, and national identity in North Africa and the Middle East.
Research
Media, society, and unrest
“Perceived Racial Threats Increase Demand for Conservative Media: Evidence from Black Lives Matter Protests and Fox News Ratings”, with Jeffrey L. Jensen. [preprint]
“How Symbols Influence Social Media Discourse: An Embedding Regression Analysis of Trump’s Return to Twitter”, with Jeffrey Sachs. 2023. Socius 9. [link]
“‘Born for a Storm’: Hard-Right Social Media and Civil Unrest”, with Andrew Linke, Edward Holland, and Edward Hendrickson. 2023. American Sociological Review 88: 322-349. [link]
“Small Town Propaganda: The Content and Emotions of Politicized Digital Local News in the United States”, with Anjali Agrawal. 2021. Poetics 92: 101641. [link]
“Rhetorics of Radicalism”, with Michael Freedman. 2019. American Sociological Review 84: 726-753. [link]
Analyzing culture with text, images, and networks
“Synthetic Duality: A Framework for Analyzing Natural Language Generation's Representation of Social Reality”, with Jeffrey Sachs and Ryan Barrett. [preprint]
“Analyzing Text and Images in Digital Communication: The Case of Securitization in American White Supremacist Online Discourse”, with Michael Freedman and Noam Gidron. 2023. Socius 9. [link]
“Language Models in Sociological Research: An Application to Classifying Large Administrative Data and Measuring Religiosity”, with Jeffrey Jensen, Cole Tanigawa-Lau, Mai Oudah, Nizar Habash, and Dhia Fani. 2022. Sociological Methodology 52: 30-52. [link]
“The TikTok Self: Music, Signaling, and Identity on Social Media”, with Jeffrey Sachs and Rahshemah Wise. 2021. [preprint]
“Sociocultural Mechanisms of Conflict: Combining Topic and Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models in an Analysis of Afghanistan, 1979–2001”, with Michael Freedman. 2020. Poetics 78: 101403. [link]
“Local Peace and Contemporary Conflict: Constructing Commonality and Exclusion during War in Afghanistan”. 2017. Social Science Research 61: 75-97. [link]
“Narrative Networks”, with Katherine Stovel. 2015. International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 16. [link]
Political conflict
“Aid, Exclusion, and the Local Dynamics of Insurgency in Afghanistan”, with Sebastian Schutte. 2018. Journal of Peace Research 55: 711-725. [link] [online appendix] [blog version]
The Nils Petter Gleditsch JPR Article of the Year Award [announcement]
“Local Peace and Contemporary Conflict: Constructing Commonality and Exclusion during War in Afghanistan”. 2017. Social Science Research 61: 75-97. [link]
“Ethnicity and Nationalism in Afghanistan in the Post-2001 Era”, Introduction to special issue commemorating the 15th anniversary of September 11, 2001. 2016. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 16: 456-459. [link]
“Ethnic Political Mobilization in Contemporary Afghanistan, an Interview with Abdul Rahman Rahmani”, Interview included in a special issue commemorating the 15th anniversary of September 11, 2001. 2016. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 16: 510-517. [link]
“Aid, Power, and Grievances: Lessons for War and Peace from Rural Afghanistan”. 2015. The Economics of Peace and Security Journal 10: 43–52. [link]
Labor migration
How does the recruitment of labor migrants work? To better understand the process of recruitment, Rabia Malik (University of Essex) and I are conducting a digital networked field experiment in Pakistan that examines how personal relationships and the exchange of information jointly influence labor migrants’ expectations and outcomes as they try to migrate abroad for work.
The first in a series of research papers:
“Dynamics of Immobility: Capability Conversion among Aspiring Migrants in Pakistan”. 2022. International Migration 69: 126-142. [link]
The project is supported by funding from the Research & Empirical Analysis of Labor Migration Program.
Ethnicity and nation
“Hyphenated Turkishness: The Plurality of Monolithic Nationhood in Turkey”, with Serhun Al. 2016. Nationalities Papers 44: 144-64. [link]
“New Directions in the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Gulf States”. 2015. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 15: 508-10. [link]
“North Africa's Spain: Peripheral National Identities and the Nation State as Neo-Empire”. 2015. Nations and Nationalism 21: 423-444. [link]
“Minority, Law, and Belonging”, with John Foster. 2015. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 15: 102-104. [link]
“Identity Construction and the Causes of Genocidal Mass Murder”, with Daniel Chirot. 2014. Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 14: 423-444. [link]
“Ethnicity, Citizenship, and the Migration-Development Nexus: The Case of Moroccan Migrants in Spain's North African Exclaves”. 2014. Journal of Development Studies 50: 1090-1103. [link]