DIGSUM’s research group in Digital Sociology has recently appointed Xénia Farkas and Eric Boyd as new postdoctoral fellows.
Xénia has a PhD in political science (Corvinus University of Budapest, 2022), and her main research interests center on visual politics – visual political communication on social media, with a special focus on disinformation, populism, and personalization. Supervised by Simon Lindgren, Xénia will be working in the project "Postdigital Propaganda? Understanding Digitally Enabled Disinformation". The project investigates the pervasive issue of digital disinformation and its implications for democracy and social cohesion. It focuses on how false information is crafted and spread across digital platforms, influencing public opinion and undermining trust in democratic institutions. Employing mixed methods, this research scrutinizes the mechanisms of disinformation, from creation to circulation on social media, and evaluates societal efforts to counteract its effects. It addresses critical questions regarding the strategies used in disinformation campaigns, their propagation, and public responses to these challenges.
Eric has an interdisciplinary background in environmental science (BSc, University of Dundee) and social anthropology (MSc, University College London), specialising in extractivism, critical heritage studies, and hauntology (PhD, University of Durham). As a postdoc, Eric will be supervised by Samuel Merrill and working in the project “#NeverForget vs. #NeverHappened: Holocaust Commemoration and Contestation on Social Media”. The main objective of the project is to analyze the contemporary commemoration and contestation of the Holocaust on social media during its anniversaries. It also studies the role that social media platforms play in these matters in terms of their technical design and underlying algorithms. It will generate new knowledge, of relevance to a range of societal stakeholders, at a time when memory of the Holocaust is not only being eroded by the passing of its living survivors but also faces the heightened risks associated with a contemporary political landscape characterized by increasing polarisation, especially online.