Research

Dissertation Link to heading

The Effectiveness of Digital Feminist Activism: The #PınarGültekin Movement in Türkiye
Anticipated defense: February 2027

This mixed-methods dissertation examines how digital feminist activism produces political, discursive, and experiential effects under conditions of platform inequality and political repression. Focusing on the #PınarGültekin movement in Türkiye, it combines social network analysis, computational text analysis, qualitative discourse analysis, and interviews with campaign participants. The project investigates how platform infrastructures stratify feminist visibility, how structural and postfeminist interpretations circulate through movement discourse, and how affective participation and maintenance labor shape participants’ experiences of collective action. It argues that the effectiveness of digital activism cannot be assessed only through policy outcomes or online visibility, but must also be understood through the unequal production of visibility, the interpretations movements make available, and the lasting consequences of participation.

Advisor: Paul E. Johnson
Committee: Elfriede Fürsich, Olga Kuchinskaya, and Müge Finkel

Research Appointments and Collaborations Link to heading

GSO, Communication Technology Research Lab (CTRL), University of Pittsburgh — Summer 2026 Link to heading

Research collaboration with Samuel C. Woolley, inaugural William S. Dietrich II Endowed Chair in Disinformation Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Communication.

  • Conduct qualitative research on disinformation ecologies and public responses in Türkiye, including interviews with journalists, fact-checkers, activists, academics, and civil-society professionals.
  • Contribute to research design, participant recruitment, interviewing, qualitative analysis, and collaborative manuscript development.
  • Develop three co-authored manuscripts addressing interview findings, bottom-up responses to disinformation, and case-based patterns of disinformation and civil-society response.

Research Methods and Technical Skills Link to heading

Research methods: Mixed-methods research; social network analysis; time-series analysis; computational text analysis; topic modeling (LDA/STM); qualitative interviewing; thematic, discourse, and qualitative coding; digital trace-data analysis.

Software and production: R; Gephi; Adobe Creative Cloud (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro); Microsoft Office.