Dr. Azade Kakavand

Azade Kakavand joined the Social Media Observatory of the Research Institute Social Cohesion and the Media Research Methods Lab at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI) as a postdoc in July 2025.

Her research interests include technology affordances, social media and polarization. She uses computational methods, especially network analysis and text-as-data methods.

Azade Kakavand is pursuing her doctorate at the University of Vienna on technological affordances, social media and the networked far-right. She also worked on various interdisciplinary research projects at the university.

For her Bachelor’s degree, she studied International Relations and Economics at the University of Erfurt. She completed her Master’s degree in “Journalism, Media and Globalisation” at Aarhus University and the University of Amsterdam.