Thursday, December 9, 2021 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm
Event Calendar Category
ORC
Speaker Name
Fotini Christia
Affiliation
MIT
Building and Room number
E51-149
Abstract
In the past ten years the Syrian civil war has resulted in the displacement of several million people now residing inside Syria as internally displaced or in neighboring countries as refugees. This paper analyzes how the widespread use of social media has recorded considerations around internal displacement and return for Syrian refugees. We use millions of social media text postings and image data from three widely used platforms (Twitter, Telegram, and Facebook) to understand differences in discussion around displacement and return. Since monitoring refugee return in war prone areas is a complex, expensive and sometimes dangerous task, the use of social media may provide researchers, aid groups and policymakers with tools for assessing return in areas where survey or other data is unavailable or difficult to obtain. This is joint work with Erin Walk and Kiran Garimella.
Biography
Fotini Christia is the Ford International Professor in the Social Sciences and Director of the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC). She received her PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University in 2008 and has been awarded an inaugural Andrew Carnegie fellowship and a Harvard Academy fellowship among others. Her research interests deal with issues of conflict and cooperation in the Muslim world, and she has worked out of Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iraq, Yemen and the Palestinian Territories. Her book, Alliance Formation in Civil Wars, published by Cambridge University Press in 2012, was awarded the Luebbert Award for Best Book in Comparative Politics, the Lepgold Prize for Best Book in International Relations and the Distinguished Book Award of the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Section of the International Studies Association. Her research has also appeared in Science, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Development Economics, American Political Science Review, and Journal of Comparative Politics, among other journals. Fotini Christia has written opinion pieces for Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. She graduated magna cum laude with a joint BA in Economics-Operations Research and a Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University in 2001.