I am an Assistant Professor in computational political science at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (Rabat, Morocco).
Curriculum Vitae
My CV is available here:
Past Appointments
Assistant Professor at University Mohammed VI Polytechnique (Rabat, Morocco)
(2020-)
Faculty of Governance, Economics, & Social Sciences
Research Fellow at Twitter MNA Lab (The World Bank Group)
(2021 – 2022)
With Poverty Practice Middle East & North Africa (POV-MENA) & Development Research Group, under Roy Van der Weide
Young Fellow in Forced Displacement at The World Bank Group
(2020 – 2021)
With Social Development Europe & Central Asia (SD-ECA), under the supervision of Audrey Sacks
PhD in Political Science at the University of Toronto (2015- 2021)
Dissertation: “Structures Strike Back: Their Significance for Our Models of Opinion Formation”; Committee: Christopher B. Cochrane & Aisha Ahmad (cochairs), Ludovic Rheault
Research Focus
Protests & Social Movements
Natural Language Processing
Migration
My Work
I’m fascinated by the way people think and act in relation to politics. I’ve gone from Cote d’Ivoire, Lebanon, Montreal, Toronto, and now Morocco in the aim to better understand it. After delving into the theory and historical side of politics with my BA and MA, I focused on big data and language models during my PhD in order to find trends, patterns and causes in the way people behave politically. For this reason, my regional expertise lies in the Middle East and North Africa region but my scientific research cuts across various countries.
In fact, my current research revolves around two topics of social inquiry: protests and migration. On the first topic, I am starting a number of projects based on novel measures of protest cycles using both protest event data and social media data. I will post updates on these research projects throughout the next few months so stay tuned! In the past, I led a team of researchers between political and computer sciences to generate measures of social movement activities and predict events like protests using social media data. This work was published in Sociological Methods & Research, and the business side of this project is being formalized into the start-up “Maidan“.
On the topic of migration, I worked during fiscal year 2020-2021 with the Social Development team of Europe and Central Asia at the World Bank to write a paper on the impact of COVID19 on attitudes toward Refugees in Turkey. Co authors and I used Google Mobility data for Turkey along with Twitter posts about refugees during the pandemic to test the contact theory of anti-immigrant sentiment. We are currently preparing a survey experiment to further test the mechanism we expounded in the paper, and a preprint is currently under review for the World Bank Policy Papers’ Series
Prior to my current appointments, I pursued my PhD in political science at the University of Toronto (Canada) where I was a Junior Fellow at Massey College for the duration of my doctoral studies. In the past, I also worked on refugee resettlement with the Lebanese Embassy in Cote d’Ivoire during the 2011 episode of the local civil war and conducted ethnographies of the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon.
My research was generously supported by DFID-UNHCR-World Bank group. I was also lucky to count on the support of the University of Toronto–Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS)– and the Social Science Research Council of Canada–Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship Program (Doctoral Scholarship).
Prof. Amir Abdul Reda 