Current research

Since I find myself in-between PhD and future research opportunities, my current research interests are a mix of dissertation-related papers and side avenues I have yet to explore. Below, I reflect on some of the published/under review pieces and share some less-developed ideas.

Transgressing sex/gender: how frames affect support for trans inclusion in sports

This research was inspired by the Trump’s executive order and the focus on “sex”-based terms, such as male/female and “sex assigned at birth” instead of terms associated with “gender identity”. Considering that elite framing matters and can influence political attitudes and behaviors, I test whether using “sex”-based frame vs. “gender”-based frame affects one’s support for trans inclusion in sports.

Pre-registration is available on OSF: https://osf.io/26uzm

From “girls” to “women”: construction of personal responsibility in gendered public policies (w/ Dr. Mariia Tepliakova)

This co-authored paper is inspired by different ways politicians talk about gendered policies: for example, access to abortions is about “young women”, sports rights are about “girls”, and parental leave debates are about “women” and “gender inequality”. How political actors discursively construct “women” as a category has become a major question across feminist political theory and political communication, with scholars demonstrating that gendered categories are deeply strategic in legislative debate. The problem is, we still know remarkably little about the systematic patterns in how parties deploy different gendered referents — especially the shift between “girls” and “women” — and what ideological work these lexical choices perform in policy conflicts; this lack of knowledge prevents us from fully understanding how gender is instrumentalised within elite discourse.

Using US Senate and UK parliamentary debates, we construct contextual word embeddings and then link these embeddings to metadata on speakers, issue areas, parties, and time to run embeddings regressions that isolate the latent meaning structure of “girls” versus “women” in abortion, healthcare, sports, and related gender policy areas. By tracing how elites weaponise lexical shifts between “girls” and “women,” this project sheds new light on the neglected mechanism through which gender is coded, moralised, and manipulated through the linguistic micro–morphology of democratic institutions.