Team

Dr Ozge Ozduzen is lecturer in Digital Media and Society in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield.

Ozge studies media activism and participation, where she investigates political voice and mobilisation and intersectional approaches to urban and digital citizenship. Her research also covers the appeal, visibility and spread of racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic texts and images online, particularly during conflicts and crises. Currently, her research is on vaccine hesitant and anti-vaccination talk and social identities in online and protest spaces.

So far, Ozge’s research has been funded by the British Academy; Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC); Swedish Institute; the European Commission and Political Studies Association (PSA).

She is a PI on the British Academy project entitled 'Mapping and visualising intersections of social inequalities, community mistrust, and vaccine hesitancy in online and physical spaces in the UK and US'.

Dr Billur Aslan Ozgul is lecturer in Political Communication in the School of Social and Political Sciences at Brunel University London. Her research interests lie in the fields of media and politics with a particular focus on digital media and social movements.

Having completed her PhD in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, Billur undertook research in a broad range of fields, such as the role of information communication technologies (ICTs) in periods of protest, comparative political analysis of digitally mediated movements, and social, political and cultural impact of ICTs.

Billur's monographs are Leading protests in the digital age: Youth activism in Egypt and Syria, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2019 and Psychology of Democracy (with Darren G. Lilleker), published by Routledge in 2021. She previously conducted social media research with the BBC World Service and British Council.

She is a Co-I on the British Academy project entitled 'Mapping and visualising intersections of social inequalities, community mistrust, and vaccine hesitancy in online and physical spaces in the UK and US'.

Dr Wenwen Dou is an associate professor in the College of Computing and Informatics and a core faculty member at Charlotte Visualization Center at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research interests include Visual Analytics, Text Mining, and Human Computer Interaction.

Wenwen's research is on Visual Text Analytics, integrating statistical and machine learning methods with interactive visualisation to analyse large textual data. She also works on social media analysis to extract insights from massive social media data, such as her research on the critical events throughout the Occupy movement in temporal and geospatial dimensions, analysing Twitter streams.

Wenwen has also worked with various analytics domains in reducing information overload and providing interactive visual means to analyse unstructured information. She has experience in turning cutting-edge research into technologies that have broad societal impacts.

She is a Co-I on the British Academy project entitled 'Mapping and visualising intersections of social inequalities, community mistrust, and vaccine hesitancy in online and physical spaces in the UK and US'.

Dr Nelli Ferenczi is a Lecturer in Psychology and a member of the Centre for Culture and Evolution at Brunel University London.

Nelli completed her PhD in Psychology from Brunel University (2015). As a cross-cultural social psychologist, she is interested in applying a cultural lens to identity, our close relationships, how we engage with others, and groups.

Her research interests include the construction and maintenance of bicultural and multicultural identity, individual differences in online prosocial and antisocial behaviour, understanding the impact of marginalisation on wellbeing and the self, and the role of groups on identity and behaviour. Nelli's research has been funded by the European Commission and the British Academy in the past.

She is a Co-I on the British Academy project entitled 'Mapping and visualising intersections of social inequalities, community mistrust, and vaccine hesitancy in online and physical spaces in the UK and US'.

Dr Alireza Karduni is a Postdoctoral Scholar Jointly at Northwestern University’s departments of Computer Science and Psychology. He received his PhD in Computing and Information systems from UNC-Charlotte.

Ali’s research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction, visualisation, and computational social sciences, and explores interactions between individuals, communities, and social media. His recent monograph is entitled Social Media and the Contemporary City (with Eric Sauda and Ginette Wessel), published by Routledge.

His work currently focuses on developing novel platforms and techniques for combating misinformed, polarised, and flawed conversations on social media. So far, his research has been supported by the British Academy and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Ali is the consultant for the British Academy project 'Mapping and visualising intersections of social inequalities, community mistrust, and vaccine hesitancy in online and physical spaces in the UK and US'.

Bogdan Ianoșev is a PhD candidate at the Glasgow School for Business and Society, at Glasgow Caledonian University. He was previously awarded an MA in Philosophy from the University of Bucharest, as well as an MA in Cognitive Anthropology from Queens University, Belfast.

He presently works as a researcher on the European Union funded Horizon 2020 Democratic Efficacy and the Varieties of Populism in Europe (DEMOS) project, as well as doing research into the cognitive and evolutionary underpinnings of populist discourse surrounding the Brexit referendum for his PhD thesis.

Bogdan is also currently a Research Assistant at the University of Sheffield where he works on the British Academy funded project entitled 'Mapping and visualising intersections of social inequalities, community mistrust, and vaccine hesitancy in online and physical spaces in the UK and US'.

Monika E Fratczak joined the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield as a PhD student in 2018. Her PhD research explores emotional responses and (potential) democratic participation through data visualisation about climate change in two different national contexts.

Monika's research interests are in data (visualisation), emotions, political participation, visual communication, digital media. She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA).

After completing her postgraduate studies Monika worked on local, national, and international community art projects and in digital literacy education. In 2021 she worked as Research Assistant at University of Leeds on the AHRC funded project ‘Generic Visuals in the News: The Role of Stock Photos and Simple Data Visualisations in Assembling Publics’ funded by the AHRC.

Monika is currently a Research Assistant on the British Academy funded project entitled 'Mapping and visualising intersections of social inequalities, community mistrust, and vaccine hesitancy in online and physical spaces in the UK and US'.

Matthew is a doctoral researcher in the division of Anthropology at the Brunel University College of Business, Arts, and Social Science. His PhD research employs a psychological and cybernetic approach to the experience of minorities and marginalised communities within China's new cyber society.

Matthew's research interests are in emergent technologies that affect sociality (AR/VR and 'metaverse', HCI, AI and algorithmic systems in social media), the anthropology of emotion, visual and digital anthropology and sociology, and the use of psychoanalytic methods in social research.

Since completing his master's degree in psychological and psychiatric anthropology, Matthew has conducted independent research with virtual communities in VR, on MMORPG video games, and in Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Matthew is also currently a Research Assistant on the British Academy funded project entitled 'Mapping and visualising intersections of social inequalities, community mistrust, and vaccine hesitancy in online and physical spaces in the UK and US'.