I am a Ph.D. Candidate and teaching assistant at the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My study (supervised by Prof. Christian Baden) investigates the linguistic and rhetorical strategies used by political representatives to communicate with and relate to multiple social identity and affiliation groups within parliamentary discourse. Specifically, I am interested in studying how political representatives convey their communicative intentions towards specific target-audiences by performing various symbolic actions, representative claims, and pragmatic speech acts to maintain their political legitimacy or strengthen it further.
I earned a bachelor's degree (summa cum laude) in Social Sciences with an emphasis on Communication at the Open University. Then, I continued to earn my master's degree in Political Communication at the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2020, I finished writing my M.A thesis (supervised by Prof. Shaul Shenhav and Prof. Tamir Sheafer), which shows parliament members' systematic tendency to use speech acts explicitly and directly as part of the process of shaping the social identity-groups with which they affiliate. To complement my specialization, I did an internship at the office of the speaker of the Knesset.
I am a teaching assistant in the courses "Statistics for communication students" (50270) and "Effective verbal and non-verbal communication in the media" (50482). In 2019, I participated in a research group supervised by Prof. Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, for investigating cases in which WhatsApp users verified and confirmed (dis)information and alternative facts within political discussion groups (granted by Facebook).
Research Interests
- Political representation, symbolic action
- Representative claim
- Pragmatic speech acts
- Social identity groups
- Computational discourse analysis