About Me

I am a postdoctoral research associate at the Centre for the Comparative Study of Civil War at the University of York where I am conducting 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 received my PhD in Sociology with a designated emphasis in History of Consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz. I research war, social movements, religious sectarianism, political emotion and affect online and offline. I also hold a MS in Computer Engineering and a MA in Sociology. I have built an online data collection around the Syrian civil war with more than five hundred million tweets and hundreds of thousands of Facebook posts and news articles’ comments, which I use in conjunction with the eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in war torn Syria and Lebanon.

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.