22 May 2025

On May 19, 2025, Dr. Anastasia Menshikova successfully defended her dissertation, “Cultural Change: Studying Interdependencies in Public Discourse with Computational Text Analysis.” This marks the second PhD completion in our VR-funded research environment Mining for Meaning.

Anastasia Menshikova defends PhD thesis on social interdependencies in immigration discourses
Dr. Anastasia Menshikova with her opponent Prof. Ozan Aksoy of the University College London. Photographer: Vsevolod Suschevskiy

Dr. Menshikova’s thesis applies computational text analysis to advance sociological understanding of how public discourse reflects and shapes cultural change. Focusing on the Swedish immigration debate, it explores how discourse shifts in response to disruptive events and political crises.

Across four essays, the dissertation examines (1) individual vs. compositional drivers of online discourse shifts after terrorist attacks, (2) the limited impact of terrorism on European public opinion despite high media salience, (3) a convergence in how immigration is discussed in newspapers and online forums during the 2015–16 refugee crisis, and (4) links between everyday interests and political preferences in Sweden's multi-party system. Together, the studies demonstrate how computational methods can reveal mechanisms of cultural change.

The thesis has been supervised by Marc Keuschnigg, Selcan Mutgan, and Måns Magnusson. We thank Ozan Aksoy (University College London) for serving as opponent, and the grading committee: Milena Tsvetkova (LSE), Hernan Mondani (Södertörn University), Moa Bursell (Mälardalen University), and Friedolin Merhout (Copenhagen University).

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