What drew you to apply for the SweCSS Visiting Fellows Program, and how does it align with your research interests?
Since SweCSS is embedded in the country’s strongest research milieu in this field, I applied to the Visiting Fellows Program as soon as I learned about it. The Centre is a natural fit for my research focus, as both focus on utilizing computational methods to illuminate social scientific problems. For instance, during my PhD, I explored how natural language processing tools can offer new insights into classic sociological questions by analyzing digitized corpora of doctoral dissertations. Since then, I have continued along this interdisciplinary path, and SweCSS’s emphasis on bridging analytical sociology and computer science aligns closely with my envisioned theoretical, methodological, and empirical trajectories.
What do you hope to gain from your time as a Post-doc at SweCSS?
I hope to connect with a wide and intellectually diverse network of computational social scientists whose perspectives and expertise can enrich my own research. Being part of such a collaborative environment will hopefully allow me to engage in meaningful interdisciplinary exchange and stay at the forefront of methodological innovation in the field. In particular, I aim to deepen my skills in the latest quantitative techniques, enabling me to revisit core social scientific questions from fresh perspectives. Beyond technical skill-building, I see my time at SweCSS as an opportunity to develop lasting scholarly relationships. Ideally, this experience will lead to exciting research collaborations that extend well beyond the postdoctoral period.
What do you hope to contribute as a Post-doc at SweCSS?
With a background in rethinking core problems in social scientific theory through big data and computational tools, I hope to contribute different perspectives on how computational social science can be practiced – both methodologically and conceptually. At SweCSS, I aim to share this experience by contributing to ongoing conversations about how computational approaches can be harnessed not only to answer traditional social scientific questions but also to challenge and refine the questions themselves. Drawing on my empirical research of and networks within the social sciences, my long-term goal is to help broaden the reach and relevance of computational methods within the mainstream of these disciplines.
What advice would you give to someone considering applying to the program?
At its best, CSS is a genuinely interdisciplinary field; at its worst, it is two disciplines talking past each other – social scientists borrowing computational tools, and computer scientists borrowing social topics. Most work exists somewhere along this continuum, and it is fair to say that a shared imagination of the field is still forming. Thus, my advice to an aspiring Junior Fellow is to think carefully about how your proposal can engage with multiple adaptations of CSS while staying grounded in your core research problem and intellectual commitments. The goal is not to please everyone, but to position your work in a way that speaks across disciplinary boundaries.
