Sean Doody is a doctoral student of sociology at George Mason University who studies political economy, digital sociology, and right-wing ideological and cultural production on digital platforms.
His dissertation studies the changing structure of right-wing ideological and cultural production on the internet, specifically focusing on the right’s dominant presence on YouTube.
Key to his dissertation is a careful study of the role that rationality and formal logic play in the framing of far-right political opinions, arguments, and mythologies in the digital realm, as these right-wing actors are careful to represent themselves as somber intellectuals willing to engage in a disinterested objective examination of “the facts,” however uncomfortable or “politically incorrect” they may be.
His research uses a mixture of computational and qualitative methods, particularly natural language processing, topic modeling, and latent factor models, as well as social network analysis and digital ethnography.
