Dr Toni Rouhana
Postdoctoral Research Associate

Profile

Biography

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 roles that sect identities play before, during, and after the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon.

I hold a PhD in Sociology, with a designated emphasis in History of Consciousness, from the University of California Santa Cruz. I also hold an MS in Computer Engineering and a MA in Sociology. I study war, social movements, religious sectarianism, political emotion, and affect online and offline. I 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 used with eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in war-torn Syria and Lebanon.

My interdisciplinary research engages three areas typically treated separately: traditional ethnographic methods, theories of political identities and social movements, and ethnographically-informed computational social science analysis of daily interactions.

My research has been published in Information, Communication & Society and First Monday. My work has been supported by the Regents’ fellowship at the University of California Santa Cruz, and has been awarded a dissertation-year fellowship from the Global Religion Research Initiative (GRRI) at the University of Notre Dame.

Research

Overview

My research investigates how ordinary people mobilize their religious sect identities in times of peace and war, and those in between. I use various traditional quantitative and qualitative methods combined with novel computational social sciences methods, including machine learning (ML), social network analysis, natural language processing, computer vision, and visualizations. I situate my work in Peace and Conflict Studies, Computational Social Sciences, Contentious Politics and Social Movements, Middle East Studies, Religious Studies, Cultural Studies, and Identity Politics. My research area is the Middle East, mainly Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon.

Publications

Selected publications

Articles (peer-reviewed)

2023 “Critical Discourse Analysis Guided Topic Modeling: the Case of Al-Jazeera Arabic” Information, Communication & Society

2022 “The Syrian War on Facebook: A Call for Mixed Methods” First Monday, Volume 27, Number 9. 

Other Academic Writing

2022 “Initial Reflections on Life Histories of Ex-Combatants in the Lebanese Civil War,” Civil War Paths, Jul 1.