I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. My current research explores how the increasing adoption of digital technologies is influencing society, particularly in the contexts of social movements, politics, and culture. For example, some of my projects analyze how generative artificial intelligence can become politically biased and subsequently affect individuals’ attitudes and perceptions of society. Other projects analyze the links between social media and social movements, focusing on reactionary online content and offline protests. My earlier research focused on political violence in Afghanistan, labor migration from Pakistan, and national identity in North Africa and the Middle East. At Yale, I teach courses on quantitative methods, computational approaches to studying culture, and the sociology of backlash.
Research
Generative AI, society, and social science research
Special issue on “Generative AI and Sociological Research”, forthcoming in Sociological Methods and Research, co-edited with Thomas Davidson.
“Artificial Intelligence Summaries of Historical Events Improve Knowledge Compared to Human-Written Summaries”, with Matthew Shu, Keitaro Okura, and Thomas Davidson. [preprint]
“Synthetic Duality: A Framework for Analyzing Natural Language Generation's Representation of Social Reality”, with Jeffrey Sachs and Ryan Barrett. Forthcoming at Poetics. [preprint]
“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]
Social media and social movements
“Perceived Racial Threats Increase Demand for Conservative Media: Evidence from Black Lives Matter Protests and Fox News Ratings”, with Jeffrey L. Jensen. [preprint]
“‘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]
“How Symbols Influence Social Media Discourse: An Embedding Regression Analysis of Trump’s Return to Twitter”, with Jeffrey Sachs. 2023. Socius 9. [link]
“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]
“Small Town Propaganda: The Content and Emotions of Politicized Digital Local News in the United States”, with Anjali Agrawal. 2021. Poetics 92: 101641. [link]
“The TikTok Self: Music, Signaling, and Identity on Social Media”, with Jeffrey Sachs and Rahshemah Wise. 2021. [preprint]
Social and cultural dynamics of political violence
“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]
“Rhetorics of Radicalism”, with Michael Freedman. 2019. American Sociological Review 84: 726-753. [link]
“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]
“Local Peace and Contemporary Conflict: Constructing Commonality and Exclusion during War in Afghanistan”. 2017. Social Science Research 61: 75-97. [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
“Does Information Improve the Experience of Pursing Labor Migration? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Pakistan”, with Rabia Malik and Syed Kasim Najam Shah. 2024. International Migration Review. [link]
“Dynamics of Immobility: Capability Conversion among Aspiring Migrants in Pakistan”. 2022. International Migration 69: 126-142. [link]
Ethnic and national identity
“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]