Saif Shahin
Biographic Data
| ID | 316729 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Saif Shahin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Saif |
| FAMILY NAME | Shahin |
| SIGNATURE | SHAHIN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tilburg University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7608-7283 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 138 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 28 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Migration to/from China in the digital age
This special issue explores how China’s digital ecosystem creates unique opportunities and challenges for Chinese citizens living overseas as well as for transnational migrants residing in China. It views migration to and from China at the juncture of policies, publics, and platforms and examines their interplay in the practices of migrants along with discourses about migrants from diverse contexts. Drawing attention to how everyday practices pro…
Imported Nationalism
This study turns attention to emergence of foreign influencers who have gained a strong following on China’s digital platforms by promoting Chinese nationalism to a domestic audience. Drawing on data collected in 2020-2021, it sheds light on how the sociotechnical affordances of a platform like Weibo enable the discursive construction of nationalism in the posts of foreign influencers and its amplification through the comments of their Chinese fo…
Negotiating digital visibility in Asia
This special issue explores the complex dynamics of digital visibility negotiation in Asian contexts. Emerging scholarship on this topic reveals how users strategically negotiate their visibility online. However, we still need to broaden the scope of our knowledge, especially outside Western contexts, in order to advance our theoretical understanding of such negotiations. Asian societies and communities, with their distinctive platform political …
Fractured spectacle
Late modern society has been conceptualized as a spectacle , a metaphor that brings to light not only its commodification but also the benumbing impact of mass media on the audience’s political agency. This study turns attention to the spectacle in the age of social media. Building on a growing body of research on the spectacle of suffering, we compare reactions to the 2022 Itaewon Halloween stampede, which claimed more than 150 lives, across Kor…
Introduction
Counterprotests have become commonplace around the world today in various issue areas, ranging from abortion, migration, and LGBTQ+ rights to disarmament, labor, and climate change. And yet, our knowledge about the relationship between protests and counterprotests remains limited-especially with respect to concrete interactions between them in situ . This introduction outlines how the articles in the special issue contribute to a better understan…
StopAsianHate as Hashtag Activism
The #StopAsianHate hashtag movement emerged as a challenge to the rising tide of racism in the United States during the coronavirus pandemic and contributed to the legislation of the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act. Our research brings together concepts from social movement studies as well as network science and celebrity-fandom studies to examine a corpus of tweets about the movement. We employ a mixed-methods design combining structural topic modeling…
Platform affordances and spiral of silence
Reciprocity and asymmetry in digital diplomacy
An emerging line of research has drawn attention to the significance of national identity in shaping digital diplomatic practices. In this study, we look at the reciprocal construction of national identity on Twitter by corresponding foreign missions. Specifically, we examine one year of Twitter posts from the South Korean missions in Japan and the United States as well as the reciprocal missions of Japan and the United States in South Korea. Our…
Affective Polarization of a Protest and a Counterprotest
Protest movements around the world have become increasingly likely to incite counterprotests that adopt an opposing stance. This study examines how a protest and a counterprotest interact with and shape each other as digitally networked connective action. My empirical focus is the so-called Million MAGA March-in which supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump protested the "stealing" of the November 2020 election by his rival, Joe Biden-and a cou…
News, Nations, and Power Relations
This article adopts a poststructural approach to examine the relationship between the news media and international relations. It compares 15 years of international aid coverage from two donor nations, the United States and Britain, and two recipient nations, India and Pakistan, to understand the types of identities news media construct for a nation in relation to other nations. Despite their differences, the news discourse in all four nations has…
Connective action or collective inertia? Emotion, cognition, and the limits of digitally networked resistance
Connective action, or individuals networking with each other online to form social movements, rarely leads to lasting change. In this study, we argue that such movements are ultimately ineffective because they struggle to sustain themselves over time and identify the reasons behind their transience. Our analysis focuses on Twitter conversations about Aadhaar, a biometric ID project that has raised concerns about data privacy and civil liberty in …
User-generated nationalism
This article examines how the nationalist imagination structures cyberspace from the bottom up, or what I call user-generated nationalism. It also looks at the interplay between nationalism and other, non-spatial modes of social identification. My analysis of a month of tweets indicates that religious, racialized, and partisan identities are quite pronounced online, but they also tend to be conflated with nationalism. I argue that nationalism is …
Black Lives Matter goes global
This study examines the global diffusion of Black Lives Matter (BLM) as digitally networked connective action. Combining social network analysis with qualitative textual analysis, we show that BLM was hybridized in different ways to give voice to local struggles for social justice in Brazil, India, and Japan. However, BLM’s hybridization stirred right-wing backlash within these countries that not only targeted local movements but BLM too. Theoret…
Live tweeting live debates
Political campaigns mostly run parallel to each other during an election cycle, but intersect when the main candidates face off for televised debates. They offer supporters of these candidates a chance to engage with each other while being exposed to views and opinions different from their own. This study uses a combination of social network analysis and machine learning to examine how the three US presidential debates of 2016 were live tweeted (…
Peripheral elaboration model
This study places the “cognitive elaboration model” on news gathering and political behavior within the dual-processing “elaboration likelihood model” to derive hypotheses about the effects of incidental news exposure and tests them using two-wave panel data. Results indicate incidental news exposure predicts online participation but not offline participation – underlining the importance of differentiating between political behaviors in the two e…
Access shrugged
This article maps patterns of interest in key terms associated with copyright and online culture in the US context. Using exploratory factor analysis of data from Google Trends, authors examined patterns in keyword searches between 2004 and 2019. The data show three distinct periods of interest. The first period consists of utopian, cause-driven search terms; the second marks a rise and eventual decline in creatively motivated, maker-fueled searc…
Ideological parallelism
This study advances the protest paradigm as a transnational theory by examining how ideological affiliations within and across national borders influence the framing of a protest movement. Our empirical focus is the coverage of the 2016–17 South Korean 'candlelight' protests to oust conservative President Park Gyun-hye in Korean and US newspapers. Content analysis of 6 months of coverage suggests that liberal publications in both nations (Kyunghy…
Facing up to Facebook
This study traces how Facebook-promoted internet.org/Free Basics, despite initial acclaim, was eventually rejected in India – and how net neutrality came to be codified in the process. Topic modeling of articles (N = 1752) published over two-and-a-half years in 100 media outlets pinpoints the critical junctures in time at which the public discourse changed its trajectory. Critical discourse analysis of different phases of the discourse then ident…
A Tale of Two Tragedies
Published in: Journalism Practice, 2019, Vol. 13, No. 8, 931-935
Understanding Public Engagement With Global Aid Agencies on Twitter
This study develops a technosocial framework for assessing the efficacy of global aid agencies' use of Twitter's algorithmic affordances for participatory social change. We combine computational and interpretive methods to examine tweets posted by three global aid agencies-U.S. Agency for International Development, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and the International Committee of the Red Cross-as well as public tweets that …
Big Data and the Illusion of Choice
India and China have launched enormous projects aimed at collecting vital personal information regarding their billion-plus populations and building the world’s biggest data sets in the process. However, both Aadhaar in India and the Social Credit System in China are controversial and raise a plethora of political and ethical concerns. The governments claim that participation in these projects is voluntary, even as they link vital services to cit…
Social Media and Social Mobilisation in the Middle East
The role of the media, and especially the social media, in the Arab Spring has been extensively debated in academia. This study presents a survey of studies published in scholarly journals on the subject since 2011. We find that the bulk of the research contends that social media enabled or facilitated the protests by providing voice to people in societies with mostly government-controlled legacy media; helping people connect, mobilise and organi…
Protesting the Paradigm
This study assesses the scope and applicability of the “protest paradigm” in non-Western contexts by examining the news coverage of Brazilian, Chinese, and Indian protests in their domestic media. Two publications from each nation, one conservative and one progressive, are content analyzed for adherence to a series of marginalization devices that have often been used by the U.S. media to ridicule protest movements and portray them as violent. The…
When Scale Meets Depth
As computer-assisted research of voluminous datasets becomes more pervasive, so does the criticism of its epistemological, methodological, and ethical/normative inadequacies. This article proposes a hybrid approach that combines the scale of computational methods with the depth of qualitative analysis. It uses simple natural language processing algorithms to extract purposive samples from large textual corpora, which can then be analyzed using in…
Mediated modernities
This article proposes a theoretical framework for understanding modernity as lying at the intersection of two dimensions: (1) the narrative of modernity as interpreted variously in particular nations and (2) the metanarrative of modernity as a universal goal that nations tend to share. It demonstrates that interpretations of modernity vary among nations, and even within nations over time. But modernity in former European colonies is nonetheless a…
Black Lives Matter goes global
This study examines the global diffusion of Black Lives Matter (BLM) as digitally networked connective action. Combining social network analysis with qualitative textual analysis, we show that BLM was hybridized in different ways to give voice to local struggles for social justice in Brazil, India, and Japan. However, BLM’s hybridization stirred right-wing backlash within these countries that not only targeted local movements but BLM too. Theoret…
Protesting the Paradigm
This study assesses the scope and applicability of the “protest paradigm” in non-Western contexts by examining the news coverage of Brazilian, Chinese, and Indian protests in their domestic media. Two publications from each nation, one conservative and one progressive, are content analyzed for adherence to a series of marginalization devices that have often been used by the U.S. media to ridicule protest movements and portray them as violent. The…
Social Media and Social Mobilisation in the Middle East
The role of the media, and especially the social media, in the Arab Spring has been extensively debated in academia. This study presents a survey of studies published in scholarly journals on the subject since 2011. We find that the bulk of the research contends that social media enabled or facilitated the protests by providing voice to people in societies with mostly government-controlled legacy media; helping people connect, mobilise and organi…
Ideological parallelism
This study advances the protest paradigm as a transnational theory by examining how ideological affiliations within and across national borders influence the framing of a protest movement. Our empirical focus is the coverage of the 2016–17 South Korean 'candlelight' protests to oust conservative President Park Gyun-hye in Korean and US newspapers. Content analysis of 6 months of coverage suggests that liberal publications in both nations (Kyunghy…
Big Data and the Illusion of Choice
India and China have launched enormous projects aimed at collecting vital personal information regarding their billion-plus populations and building the world’s biggest data sets in the process. However, both Aadhaar in India and the Social Credit System in China are controversial and raise a plethora of political and ethical concerns. The governments claim that participation in these projects is voluntary, even as they link vital services to cit…
Connective action or collective inertia? Emotion, cognition, and the limits of digitally networked resistance
Connective action, or individuals networking with each other online to form social movements, rarely leads to lasting change. In this study, we argue that such movements are ultimately ineffective because they struggle to sustain themselves over time and identify the reasons behind their transience. Our analysis focuses on Twitter conversations about Aadhaar, a biometric ID project that has raised concerns about data privacy and civil liberty in …
Peripheral elaboration model
This study places the “cognitive elaboration model” on news gathering and political behavior within the dual-processing “elaboration likelihood model” to derive hypotheses about the effects of incidental news exposure and tests them using two-wave panel data. Results indicate incidental news exposure predicts online participation but not offline participation – underlining the importance of differentiating between political behaviors in the two e…
News Framing as Identity Performance
This study examines how two publications with a common religious affiliation—“Muslim/Islamic”—but different racial affiliations—“indigenous/Black” and “immigrant/Arab”—frame news events. It develops two interrelated ideas. First, identity is not simply an “individual level” but also a higher, “organizational level” of influence on news. Second, news organizations perform their identities in how they frame news. Comparative frame analysis reveals …
Affective Polarization of a Protest and a Counterprotest
Protest movements around the world have become increasingly likely to incite counterprotests that adopt an opposing stance. This study examines how a protest and a counterprotest interact with and shape each other as digitally networked connective action. My empirical focus is the so-called Million MAGA March-in which supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump protested the "stealing" of the November 2020 election by his rival, Joe Biden-and a cou…
Understanding Public Engagement With Global Aid Agencies on Twitter
This study develops a technosocial framework for assessing the efficacy of global aid agencies' use of Twitter's algorithmic affordances for participatory social change. We combine computational and interpretive methods to examine tweets posted by three global aid agencies-U.S. Agency for International Development, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and the International Committee of the Red Cross-as well as public tweets that …
When Scale Meets Depth
As computer-assisted research of voluminous datasets becomes more pervasive, so does the criticism of its epistemological, methodological, and ethical/normative inadequacies. This article proposes a hybrid approach that combines the scale of computational methods with the depth of qualitative analysis. It uses simple natural language processing algorithms to extract purposive samples from large textual corpora, which can then be analyzed using in…
StopAsianHate as Hashtag Activism
The #StopAsianHate hashtag movement emerged as a challenge to the rising tide of racism in the United States during the coronavirus pandemic and contributed to the legislation of the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act. Our research brings together concepts from social movement studies as well as network science and celebrity-fandom studies to examine a corpus of tweets about the movement. We employ a mixed-methods design combining structural topic modeling…
Platform affordances and spiral of silence
News, Nations, and Power Relations
This article adopts a poststructural approach to examine the relationship between the news media and international relations. It compares 15 years of international aid coverage from two donor nations, the United States and Britain, and two recipient nations, India and Pakistan, to understand the types of identities news media construct for a nation in relation to other nations. Despite their differences, the news discourse in all four nations has…
Mediated modernities
This article proposes a theoretical framework for understanding modernity as lying at the intersection of two dimensions: (1) the narrative of modernity as interpreted variously in particular nations and (2) the metanarrative of modernity as a universal goal that nations tend to share. It demonstrates that interpretations of modernity vary among nations, and even within nations over time. But modernity in former European colonies is nonetheless a…
Framing “Bad News
This study proposes a dichotomous set of frames, the Blame Frame and the Explain Frame, to examine how the news media cover sudden tragic events. The Blame Frame affixes responsibility on human agents and foregrounds the pursuit of punishment and justice. The Explain Frame takes responsibility away from human agents and describes the tragedy in terms of natural or quasi-natural processes. The study argues that social identities of “prospective” a…
Unveiling the American-Muslim press
The growing scholarly literature on Muslims and the media in the United States has paid little attention to the American-Muslim press. This study compares the coverage of two major American-Muslim publications, the bimonthly news magazine Islamic Horizons and the weekly tabloid Muslim Journal, at four key moments beginning with 9/11. Content analysis ( N = 576) indicates both publications are overwhelmingly US-centric, focusing on domestic politi…
Fractured spectacle
Late modern society has been conceptualized as a spectacle , a metaphor that brings to light not only its commodification but also the benumbing impact of mass media on the audience’s political agency. This study turns attention to the spectacle in the age of social media. Building on a growing body of research on the spectacle of suffering, we compare reactions to the 2022 Itaewon Halloween stampede, which claimed more than 150 lives, across Kor…
Access shrugged
This article maps patterns of interest in key terms associated with copyright and online culture in the US context. Using exploratory factor analysis of data from Google Trends, authors examined patterns in keyword searches between 2004 and 2019. The data show three distinct periods of interest. The first period consists of utopian, cause-driven search terms; the second marks a rise and eventual decline in creatively motivated, maker-fueled searc…
A Tale of Two Tragedies
Published in: Journalism Practice, 2019, Vol. 13, No. 8, 931-935
Unveiling the American-Muslim press
The growing scholarly literature on Muslims and the media in the United States has paid little attention to the American-Muslim press. This study compares the coverage of two major American-Muslim publications, the bimonthly news magazine Islamic Horizons and the weekly tabloid Muslim Journal, at four key moments beginning with 9/11. Content analysis ( N = 576) indicates both publications are overwhelmingly US-centric, focusing on domestic politi…
Mediated modernities
This article proposes a theoretical framework for understanding modernity as lying at the intersection of two dimensions: (1) the narrative of modernity as interpreted variously in particular nations and (2) the metanarrative of modernity as a universal goal that nations tend to share. It demonstrates that interpretations of modernity vary among nations, and even within nations over time. But modernity in former European colonies is nonetheless a…
Framing “Bad News
This study proposes a dichotomous set of frames, the Blame Frame and the Explain Frame, to examine how the news media cover sudden tragic events. The Blame Frame affixes responsibility on human agents and foregrounds the pursuit of punishment and justice. The Explain Frame takes responsibility away from human agents and describes the tragedy in terms of natural or quasi-natural processes. The study argues that social identities of “prospective” a…
News Framing as Identity Performance
This study examines how two publications with a common religious affiliation—“Muslim/Islamic”—but different racial affiliations—“indigenous/Black” and “immigrant/Arab”—frame news events. It develops two interrelated ideas. First, identity is not simply an “individual level” but also a higher, “organizational level” of influence on news. Second, news organizations perform their identities in how they frame news. Comparative frame analysis reveals …
Protesting the Paradigm
This study assesses the scope and applicability of the “protest paradigm” in non-Western contexts by examining the news coverage of Brazilian, Chinese, and Indian protests in their domestic media. Two publications from each nation, one conservative and one progressive, are content analyzed for adherence to a series of marginalization devices that have often been used by the U.S. media to ridicule protest movements and portray them as violent. The…
When Scale Meets Depth
As computer-assisted research of voluminous datasets becomes more pervasive, so does the criticism of its epistemological, methodological, and ethical/normative inadequacies. This article proposes a hybrid approach that combines the scale of computational methods with the depth of qualitative analysis. It uses simple natural language processing algorithms to extract purposive samples from large textual corpora, which can then be analyzed using in…
Social Media and Social Mobilisation in the Middle East
The role of the media, and especially the social media, in the Arab Spring has been extensively debated in academia. This study presents a survey of studies published in scholarly journals on the subject since 2011. We find that the bulk of the research contends that social media enabled or facilitated the protests by providing voice to people in societies with mostly government-controlled legacy media; helping people connect, mobilise and organi…
Big Data and the Illusion of Choice
India and China have launched enormous projects aimed at collecting vital personal information regarding their billion-plus populations and building the world’s biggest data sets in the process. However, both Aadhaar in India and the Social Credit System in China are controversial and raise a plethora of political and ethical concerns. The governments claim that participation in these projects is voluntary, even as they link vital services to cit…
Facing up to Facebook
This study traces how Facebook-promoted internet.org/Free Basics, despite initial acclaim, was eventually rejected in India – and how net neutrality came to be codified in the process. Topic modeling of articles (N = 1752) published over two-and-a-half years in 100 media outlets pinpoints the critical junctures in time at which the public discourse changed its trajectory. Critical discourse analysis of different phases of the discourse then ident…
A Tale of Two Tragedies
Published in: Journalism Practice, 2019, Vol. 13, No. 8, 931-935
Understanding Public Engagement With Global Aid Agencies on Twitter
This study develops a technosocial framework for assessing the efficacy of global aid agencies' use of Twitter's algorithmic affordances for participatory social change. We combine computational and interpretive methods to examine tweets posted by three global aid agencies-U.S. Agency for International Development, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and the International Committee of the Red Cross-as well as public tweets that …
Live tweeting live debates
Political campaigns mostly run parallel to each other during an election cycle, but intersect when the main candidates face off for televised debates. They offer supporters of these candidates a chance to engage with each other while being exposed to views and opinions different from their own. This study uses a combination of social network analysis and machine learning to examine how the three US presidential debates of 2016 were live tweeted (…
Peripheral elaboration model
This study places the “cognitive elaboration model” on news gathering and political behavior within the dual-processing “elaboration likelihood model” to derive hypotheses about the effects of incidental news exposure and tests them using two-wave panel data. Results indicate incidental news exposure predicts online participation but not offline participation – underlining the importance of differentiating between political behaviors in the two e…
Access shrugged
This article maps patterns of interest in key terms associated with copyright and online culture in the US context. Using exploratory factor analysis of data from Google Trends, authors examined patterns in keyword searches between 2004 and 2019. The data show three distinct periods of interest. The first period consists of utopian, cause-driven search terms; the second marks a rise and eventual decline in creatively motivated, maker-fueled searc…
Ideological parallelism
This study advances the protest paradigm as a transnational theory by examining how ideological affiliations within and across national borders influence the framing of a protest movement. Our empirical focus is the coverage of the 2016–17 South Korean 'candlelight' protests to oust conservative President Park Gyun-hye in Korean and US newspapers. Content analysis of 6 months of coverage suggests that liberal publications in both nations (Kyunghy…
User-generated nationalism
This article examines how the nationalist imagination structures cyberspace from the bottom up, or what I call user-generated nationalism. It also looks at the interplay between nationalism and other, non-spatial modes of social identification. My analysis of a month of tweets indicates that religious, racialized, and partisan identities are quite pronounced online, but they also tend to be conflated with nationalism. I argue that nationalism is …
Black Lives Matter goes global
This study examines the global diffusion of Black Lives Matter (BLM) as digitally networked connective action. Combining social network analysis with qualitative textual analysis, we show that BLM was hybridized in different ways to give voice to local struggles for social justice in Brazil, India, and Japan. However, BLM’s hybridization stirred right-wing backlash within these countries that not only targeted local movements but BLM too. Theoret…
Connective action or collective inertia? Emotion, cognition, and the limits of digitally networked resistance
Connective action, or individuals networking with each other online to form social movements, rarely leads to lasting change. In this study, we argue that such movements are ultimately ineffective because they struggle to sustain themselves over time and identify the reasons behind their transience. Our analysis focuses on Twitter conversations about Aadhaar, a biometric ID project that has raised concerns about data privacy and civil liberty in …
Reciprocity and asymmetry in digital diplomacy
An emerging line of research has drawn attention to the significance of national identity in shaping digital diplomatic practices. In this study, we look at the reciprocal construction of national identity on Twitter by corresponding foreign missions. Specifically, we examine one year of Twitter posts from the South Korean missions in Japan and the United States as well as the reciprocal missions of Japan and the United States in South Korea. Our…
Affective Polarization of a Protest and a Counterprotest
Protest movements around the world have become increasingly likely to incite counterprotests that adopt an opposing stance. This study examines how a protest and a counterprotest interact with and shape each other as digitally networked connective action. My empirical focus is the so-called Million MAGA March-in which supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump protested the "stealing" of the November 2020 election by his rival, Joe Biden-and a cou…
News, Nations, and Power Relations
This article adopts a poststructural approach to examine the relationship between the news media and international relations. It compares 15 years of international aid coverage from two donor nations, the United States and Britain, and two recipient nations, India and Pakistan, to understand the types of identities news media construct for a nation in relation to other nations. Despite their differences, the news discourse in all four nations has…
Platform affordances and spiral of silence
Negotiating digital visibility in Asia
This special issue explores the complex dynamics of digital visibility negotiation in Asian contexts. Emerging scholarship on this topic reveals how users strategically negotiate their visibility online. However, we still need to broaden the scope of our knowledge, especially outside Western contexts, in order to advance our theoretical understanding of such negotiations. Asian societies and communities, with their distinctive platform political …
Fractured spectacle
Late modern society has been conceptualized as a spectacle , a metaphor that brings to light not only its commodification but also the benumbing impact of mass media on the audience’s political agency. This study turns attention to the spectacle in the age of social media. Building on a growing body of research on the spectacle of suffering, we compare reactions to the 2022 Itaewon Halloween stampede, which claimed more than 150 lives, across Kor…
Introduction
Counterprotests have become commonplace around the world today in various issue areas, ranging from abortion, migration, and LGBTQ+ rights to disarmament, labor, and climate change. And yet, our knowledge about the relationship between protests and counterprotests remains limited-especially with respect to concrete interactions between them in situ . This introduction outlines how the articles in the special issue contribute to a better understan…
Political science (23 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Social Media and Politics (20 works) · Media Studies and Communication (18 works) · Politics (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Media studies (13 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works)