People
Faculty
Filippo Andreatta
Filippo Andreatta teaches International Politics and Strategic Studies at the University of Bologna, where he is currently chair of the Department of Political and Social Science.
Giampiero Giacomello
Giampiero Giacomello is Associate Professor of Political Science. His research interests include strategic theory (mostly Clausewitz), cybersecurity and wargaming and simulation. He has extensively published on all of these topics.
Marco Albertini
Marco Albertini is Full Professor at the University of Bologna. His research interests focus on intergenerational relations; the consequences of separation and divorce; the comparative study of income inequality and social stratification; the consequences of childlessness; long-term care policies and ageing.
Matthew Loveless
Matthew Loveless is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. He investigates how individuals make sense of politics in Europe, focusing on public opinion, media use, and perceptions.Speakers
Chiara Binelli
Chiara Binelli received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University College London. She is Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna and Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Research and Social Progress (cersp.org). Her early research focused on returns to schooling, quality of education, informal labor markets, social inequality, employment and earnings’ expectations. More recently, she has been working on using data science to address policy-relevant questions such as climate change. She has published in several international journals such as the Review of Economic Dynamics, Social Indicators Research, Economics of Education Review, and World Development.
Luca Pinto
Luca Pinto is an assistant professor (tenure track) in Political Science at the University of Bologna. He completed his PhD and his undergraduate studies at the University of Milan. His research interests include party competition, governments and legislative studies, with particular attention to methodological aspects of political research. He has published on these topics several contributions in books and international journals.
Oltion Preka
Oltion Preka is adjunct professor in Big Data for the Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. He has been Research Associate at the UCD - University College Dublin (Dublin, Ireland), and has completed his PhD at the University of Bologna. He has been Consultant to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for various projects for several years. His interests focus on applying the most advanced techniques of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) (Natural Language Processing (NLP) in general and text analytics in particular) in the social sciences.
Elena Esposito
Elena Esposito is Professor of Sociology at the University Bielefeld and the University of Bologna. She has published extensively on the theory of society, media theory, memory theory and the sociology of financial markets. Her current research on algorithmic prediction is supported by a five-year Advanced Grant from the European Research Council.Teaching Assistants
Aidar Zinnatullin
Aidar Zinnatullin is a PhD student in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. He studies how political discussions evolve in the context of authoritarian politics. In the research project, Aidar uses quantitative text analysis techniques and causal inference identification strategies.
Riccardo Omenti
Riccardo Omenti is a first-year PhD student in Statistics at the University of Bologna. His research interests concern the study of quantitative methods for the social sciences as well as the implementation of statistical techniques that allow to turn the traces people leave on social media and on the internet into data suitable for demographic research. During his PhD, Riccardo will develop statistical techniques to study the evolution of fertility, mortality and migration in family networks using internet-based genealogies as part of the ERC project “Genes, genealogies and the evolution of demographic change and social inequality.
Giulio Cantone
Giulio Giacomo Cantone is a PhD. Student in Complex Systems at University of Catania. He also spent 8 month at Indiana University in the NaN [https://cnets.indiana.edu/groups/nan/people/] Research Group on Disinformation. His research background is in quantitative and simulation studies regarding commercial and political disinformation in online reviews (Review Bomb). His current interests are in Metascience and Sociology of Science, about disinformation and epistemic crises in scientific literature. In particular, his technical interests are in the sensitivity to data dredging in mainstream models of statistical regression.Participants
Andrea Knapp
Andrea Knapp is a PhD student in Political and Social Sciences (International Relations) at the University of Bologna with a background in Communication Sciences and IR. Her research interests focus on human rights protection in wars, the contribution of international organizations to the conflict management as well as the conditions of civilians during these crises. Her doctoral dissertation investigates motives for a presumed intervention selectivity into conflicts by the United Nations under the doctrine of the “Responsibility to Protect” (2005) in a mixed-methods research design.
Antonis Kalogeropoulos
Antonis Kalogeropoulos is an assistant professor of Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. His current work looks at the rise of digital and distributed sources for news, such as social media and messaging applications, its implications for the information environment and the news media industry. His research interests further include news avoidance, inequalities in news use, learning from news and trust in the news media. He has published in journals such as New Media & Society, Public Opinion Quarterly, Digital Journalism, among others. In 2021 he was awarded the Kaid-Sanders award by the International Communication Association for the best paper published in the field of Political Communication during 2020.
Bo Wang
Bo Wang is a third-year PhD candidate in Psychology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He studies the HEXACO personality traits (Honesty-Humility in particular) and their relations to work-related outcomes, including impostor phenomenon, organizational culture preference, and work motivation. Specifically, he (with his colleagues and supervisors) has validated a short Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale. As another part of his PhD project, he has developed and validated the Hazardous Organization Tool (HOT), as a tool to measure people’s willingness to work for hazardous organizations (that has been confirmed to be more attractive for people low rather than high in HEXACO Honesty-Humility) and the extent to which people perceive an organization as hazardous. He has also conducted a study examining the relations of peer- and self-report HEXACO personality traits to workplace advancement motive.
Chiara Boldrini
Chiara Boldrini is a PhD candidate in Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. Her main research interests include international security and warfare studies, foreign policy, and terrorism. Chiara’s PhD research focuses on the impact of hybrid warfare on cross-domain coercion in the contemporary era. Before starting the PhD, she obtained a MSc in International Security and Law at the University of Southern Denmark, and worked at the NATO Defense College, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean, and the International Institute for Counterterrorism.
Gaetano Giancaspro
Gaetano Giancaspro is a PhD candidate in Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. His main interests include Political and Media Discourse Analysis, Critical Migration Studies and Sociolinguistics. His research project focuses on the textual and visual representation of migrants in Information (or Awareness) Campaigns targeting potential migrants, by means of computational tools and content analysis. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Foreign Languages, Cultures and Literature from “L’Orientale” University of Naples and a Master’s in English Applied Linguistics from ELTE University of Budapest.
Giulio Tani Raffaelli
Giulio Tani Raffaelli grew up and studied in Rome. He graduated in Physics of complex systems with a thesis investigating the dynamics of human creativity. During his PhD research at the Sapienza University of Rome, he studied the application of stochastic processes to Authorship Attribution. He is now working on the privacy concerns related to Authorship Attribution technologies and their potential impact on people.
Hannah Decker
Hannah Decker works as a research assistant and is PhD candidate at the chair of Social Psychology, Media and Communication at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. She holds a master’s degree in Applied Cognitive and Media Sciences from the University Duisburg-Essen and joined the chair in 2021. Her research focuses on online political microtargeting (OPM) and the processes of political reasoning.
Shudipta Sharma
Shudipta Sharma is a doctoral student at the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. He is also an Assistant Professor (on study leave) at the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Chittagong. After completing BA and MSS degrees in Communication and Journalism at the University of Chittagong, he earned his MPhil in Government and Politics from Jahangirnagar University. He writes and presents on issues of new media and society, social movements, violent extremism, political communication, and critical communication studies.
Valeria Rainero
Valeria Rainero is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento. Her research focuses on the contemporary secularization debate and she is particularly interested in the role of researchers’ beliefs and analytical strategies in explaining outcome variability in the scientific controversy of religious change. She holds a double MA degree in Sociology from the University of Trento and the Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg.
Yi (Melissa) Liu
Yi Liu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her main interests are in social emotions and prosocial behavior. In the current project, she mainly focuses on exploring the development and characteristics of interpersonal hate and tests the psychological functions (e.g., trust, stress) when people are under interpersonal hate through both quantitative and qualitative methods.
Saba Rebecca Brause
Saba Rebecca Brause is a research assistant and doctoral candidate at the Department of Communication and Media Research (IKMZ), University of Zurich. She holds an MSc in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford, and a master's in communication from Sciences Po Paris. She previously worked as a research assistant at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin, Germany. Her doctoral research focuses on imaginaries of artificial intelligence.