We are delighted for Azade Kakavand! On September 19, she successfully defended her dissertation, “Technology Affordances, Social Media Platforms, and the Networked Far Right,” at the University of Vienna.
For her dissertation, Kakavand examined how right-wing extremists network and communicate on five social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, and Telegram. Her cumulative work consists of three studies. One study is a conceptual analysis that links existing research on the online presence of the extreme right with the concept of technological affordances. Several case studies analyze how right-wing extremist networks form on the respective platforms. Additionally, she tests various approaches to identifying and merging public actor accounts across platforms. These studies offer new conceptual, empirical, and methodological contributions to the study of right-wing extremist online presence and digital networking on social media.
Prof. Dr. Annie Waldherr and Prof. Dr. Nicola Righetti supervised the dissertation. Dr. Eva Mayerhöffer and Prof. Dr. Thorsten Quandt served as the examiners.
Since July 2025, Azade Kakavand has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Social Media Observatory of the Research Institute Social Cohesion and at the Media Research Methods Lab at HBI. While pursuing her doctorate at the University of Vienna, she collaborated on various interdisciplinary research projects at the HBI. She earned her bachelor’s degree in international relations and economics from the University of Erfurt. She completed her master’s degree in journalism, media, and globalization at Aarhus University and the University of Amsterdam.
In the photo, from left to right: Annie Waldherr, Nicola Righetti, Azade Kakavand, Eva Mayerhöffer, and Hajo Boomgaarden (chair of the dissertation defense).