Hossein Kermani, PhD
MSCA Postdoctoral Researcher
Main Research Areas
- Social media activism
- Computational propaganda
- Digital and computational methods
- Critical discourse studies on social media
Hossein Kermani is a MSCA post-doctoral researcher at the Political Communication Research Group of the University of Vienna. Hossein is studying social media, digital repression, computational propaganda and political activism in restrictive contexts, with particular attention to Iran. His research mainly revolves around a) the discursive power of social media in changing the microphysics of power and playing with the political and social structures, and b) the strategies that have been employed to manipulate and dismantle social media activism in non-democratic societies. In order to do so, Hossein is chiefly combining social and communication theories with computational techniques, in particular Social Network Analysis (SNA), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and critical discourse analysis.
Hossein has recently published in, among others, New Media and Society, Big Data & Society, Information, Communication, and Society and Asian Journal of Communication. His first book, social media research in Iran (in Farsi), was published in 2020. He is now working on his first English book, Twitter activism in Iran, which Palgrave Macmillan will publish in 2024.
Hossein welcomes interested students to work with him on their Master’s thesis or Ph.D. dissertations.
Hossein Kermani
Publications
2023
Kermani, H., Khorshidi, M., & Ashtiani Araghi, M. (2023). A case study on the COVID-19 discourse in politicians’ speeches: Investigations into the speeches of former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Studies in Communication Sciences, 23(3), 279-295. https://doi.org/10.24434/J.SCOMS.2023.03.2984
Kermani, H. (2023). Framing the pandemic on Persian Twitter: Gauging networked frames by topic modeling. American Behavioral Scientist. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642231207078
Kermani, H. (2023). #MahsaAmini: Iranian Twitter activism in times of computational propaganda. Social Movement Studies - Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest . Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2023.2180354
Jovanović , T., Bodroža , B., Orchard , L., Fullwood, C., Kermani, H., Casale , S., Fioravanti , G., Buljan , I., & Hren , D. (2023). Cross-cultural validity of the psycho-social aspects of Facebook Use (PSAFU) scale. Psihologija, 56(1), 31-62. https://doi.org/10.2298/PSI210702013J
Kermani, H., & Tafreshi, A. (2023). Walking with Bourdieu into Twitter communities: An analysis of networked publics struggling on power in Iranian Twittersphere. Information, Communication and Society, 26(8), 1653-1674. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.2021267
2022
Kermani, H. (2022). Populist discourse and the resulting discontent in hybrid regimes: An examination of Rouhani’s rhetoric in the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Political Research Exchange, 4(1), Article 2081585. https://doi.org/10.1080/2474736X.2022.2081585