Toni Rouhana is a postdoctoral research associate at the Centre for the Comparative Study of Civil War at the University of York where he is conducting a comparative study of the roles that sect identities play before, during, and after the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon.
Toni holds a PhD in Sociology, with a designated emphasis in History of Consciousness, from the University of California Santa Cruz. He also holds an MS in Computer Engineering and a MA in Sociology. He also 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 he used with eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in war-torn Syria and Lebanon to develop a novel computational methodology he is calling “Ethnographically-Informed Machine Learning.”
His interdisciplinary research engages three areas typically treated separately: traditional ethnographic methods, theories of political identities and social movements, and computational social science.
His research has been published in Information, Communication & Society and First Monday. His 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.
Key publications:
Books Civil War as a Social Process: Systems of Relations in Colombia, Lebanon, Nepal, and South Sudan under consideration by Cornell University Press, co-authored with Anastasia Shesterinina, Eduardo Álvarez-Vanegas, Hanna Ketola and Sayra van den Berg
A Theory of Practice of Sect Identities: A Case Study of the Syrian War (in preparation)
Articles (peer-reviewed)
2023 “Critical Discourse Analysis Guided Topic Modeling: the Case of Al-Jazeera Arabic,” Information, Communication & Society, 26:5, 904-922, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2023.2166364
2022 “The Syrian War on Facebook: A Call for Mixed Methods” First Monday, Volume 27, Number 9. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v27i5.11557
Manuscripts Under Review
2024 “A Critical Juncture Lived Otherwise? The Case of the “Cedar Revolution,” Ethnopolitics
Other Academic Writing
2022 “Initial Reflections on Life Histories of Ex-Combatants in the Lebanese Civil War,” Civil War Paths, Jul 1. https://www.civilwarpaths.org/2022/07/01/initial-reflections-on-life-histories-of-ex-combatants-in-the-lebanese-civil-war/