On my research project

I am interested in the margins, in what is suppressed, what has been trying to remain out of our sight, what has been historically delegitimized as banal, ordinary, and trivial. This interest takes me to the field of Critical Discourse Analysis. Based upon thoughts of Deridda, Foucault, and other CDA scholars such as Fairclough and Laclau and Mouffe, I am trying to investigate how language hides the power relations in non-democratic contexts, how dominant discourses exercise their power and how antagonistic discourses are shaped and struggled with hegemonic meaning. 

Nowadays, social media has become a powerful space for discursive struggles. Thus, I concentrate on popular social media and the way through which ordinary citizens try to destabilize hegemonic and suppressive meanings and narratives. In this sense, my research project focuses empirically on ordinary citizens' social media activism on the one hand.
On the other hand, I am investigating the mechanisms and strategies by which authoritarian regimes attempt to dismantle ordinary people's democratic efforts. Therefore, my research deals with computational propaganda and digital authoritarianism in this field. 

In order to achieve the empirical aims, I am combining CDA and textual interpretations with computational methods. Social media data are typically big and messy. It is inevitable to use them if we are to understand social media dynamics, interactions, and communication. In order to do so, the best tools we have at our disposal are collected in the field of computational social science. Therefore, my research project methodologically aims to combine textual/discourse methods with computational techniques, mainly automated text analysis algorithms, and models. In this way, I am involved in comparing traditional methods with computational techniques as well. 

In short, my research project is threefold: empirical, methodological, and theoretical. Empirically, I am trying to investigate social media activism in authoritarian regimes and the ways through which it is suppressed. Methodologically, I am concentrating on combining textual/discursive interpretations with computational methods. CDS provides me with a convenient and powerful theoretical basis to achieve these targets. However, I am not simply drawing on this theoretical foundation, I am also contributing to it by bringing discourse theory to new fields and spaces.