About Me

I am Assistant Professor of Sociology at NMSU. My interdisciplinary research focuses on war, social movements, religious sectarianism, and political emotion both online and offline, combining sociological theory with computational methods and fieldwork, including research conducted in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, to examine how sect identities are constructed, mobilized, and transformed over time. I built an extensive online data collection around the Syrian civil war, comprising millions of tweets, Facebook posts, and news articles. My work employs innovative methodologies, including ethnography, discourse analysis, and digital data analysis to understand how sect identities manifest and are reproduced in daily life. I have published articles in Information, Communication and Society, First Monday, and Ethnopolitics. I hold a PhD in Sociology with a designated emphasis in the History of Consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz, as well as an MS in Computer Engineering at the Antonine University in Lebanon.

Before joining the Sociology Department at NMSU, I was a postdoctoral research associate at the Centre for the Comparative Study of Civil War at the University of York, where I conducted a comparative study of the role that sect identities play before, during, and after the wars that took place in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. I am currently co-authoring a book titled “Civil War as a Social Process: Systems of Relations in Colombia, Lebanon, Nepal, and South Sudan.”

My interdisciplinary research engages three areas that are typically treated separately: traditional ethnographic methods, theories of political identities and social movements, and online Big Data analysis of daily interactions.

For my dissertation, I develop sectarian habitus as a concept and an analytical tool to analyze the social conditions that often lead to the politicization of religious sect identities in the Middle East. I use the ongoing war in Syria as my case study, I analyze both online and offline practices, symbolic expressions, discourses, and other manifestations of sect identities in times of peace, war, and those in between. In order to capture the production and reproduction of sectarian identities online and offline, I combine traditional ethnographic fieldwork with “big data” machine-learning methods. My research has been supported by the Regents’ fellowship at the University of California Santa Cruz and was awarded a dissertation-year fellowship from the Global Religion Research Initiative (GRRI) at the University of Notre Dame.