Hi There!
I’m Sharaj (they/them), a second year PhD student at the Network Science PhD program at Northeastern University, Boston. I’m affiliated with the Communication, Media and Marginalization (CoMM) lab and the Experiential AI Institute (EAI). I work with Dr. Samuel Scarpino and Prof. Brooke Foucault Welles.
I’m broadly interested in studying how media discourses surrounding queer issues evolve and reflect (if not drive) public attitudes. While I’m still developing my dissertation project, my current work focuses on devising mixed-methods approaches to study media coverage surrounding queer health. On one hand, I conduct qualitative thematic analysis to contextualize the discourse within a broader history of perceptions surrounding sexuality and its intersection with other facets of social identity. On the other, I leverage state of the art language models to scale up my analysis onto large corpuses of text obtained from scraping online media.
As an interdisciplinary researcher, I draw on scholarship from political communication, critical media studies, public health, collective behavior and computational social sciences. I’ve worked on networked and complex communication processes in systems ranging from kalahari meerkats to online media, using methods ranging from statistical physics-inspired numerical simulations, to qualitative text analysis and surveys. While most of my vocational training has been positivist in its philosophy, I’ve recently come to appreciate interpretivist and critical approaches to doing science, and have been integrating the same in my work. Checkout my projects page for more details on my research.
Outside of work, I love cooking elaborate meals, playing board games and listening to RnB/jazz. I owe a lot to other queer, trans and immigrant academics who’ve inspired and helped me through my career, and would love to contribute my part to your journey. As this website evolves, I’ll include resources and blogposts to facilitate this process. Meanwhile, I’m always up for a conversation and love nerding out, so feel free to hit me up at any of my above socials!