Research interests

Stemming from an interest in language, my research interests focus around two main themes. Firstly, I aim to explore organizational discursive strategies, the ways in which organizations use language in their everyday operations, and the social structure contained by organizational discourse manifestations. Secondly, I aim to mine and measure aspects of language and their influence on beliefs and behaviors in various social or political contexts. I plan to further explore these two research themes through social and semantic network analysis theories and methods. I believe these methods to be of great value to the study of complex relationships between language and social structure contained by discourse manifestations, and between language, beliefs and behaviors. As such methods can be applied to any topic or corpus, I believe in their potential to open new avenues in research on language use, discursive organizational strategies, and their social impact.

Academic background

Political Science, Communication Science, International Development Studies, Organization Sciences.


PhD research*

Can we infer rich information from `big text data'? And how can we use text-analytical methods to infer such rich information from large text collections with different characteristics? These are some of the questions that guided the aims and outcomes of the research presented in my dissertation.

Most of our knowledge of current and past world events, advances in science, or even elements of culture are gained, formed, and passed on through written and verbal text. Hence, the question is no longer whether or not text content is worth investigating, but rather which approach is the most insightful for a given research goal.

Expanding methods of relational meaning analysis, my dissertation provides an approach suited for the detection of subtle discursive dynamic shifts in large collections of (temporal) textual data. Alongside the methodological contributions, my dissertation is discourse-centered and focused on the global financial crisis and it reveals patterns of discourse, subtle dynamic shifts of discursive practices at different stages of the crisis, and dominant topics at the level of three discourses.


*This research has been funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) under the NWO-Aspasia 015-007-047 grant awarded to Dr. Iina Hellsten.