Projects per year
Personal profile
Personal Statement
My teaching and research take an interdisciplinary approach to understand new media platforms. My current research pays special attention to 'mediated publicness' enabled by social media affordances. One of my recent papers suggested that new media affordances allow novel socialities, such as instances of 'momentary connectedness', that function as extended domains of connectivity. Currently, I examine the co-existence of transactive and non-transactive utterances in issue-response networks.
I am a computational social science enthusiast, and my work applies methods in Social Network Analysis(SNA) and Natural Language Processing, such as centrality analysis, community detection, text mining, clustering, and topic model analysis. I completed my doctoral studies at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, focusing on social informatics, communication theory, and communication policy and planning. My PhD dissertation built on previous work by developing an affordance-driven multi-item scale to measure social media uses and gratification and testing it across political actor categories.
I welcome PhD students who would like to conduct their doctoral research within the broad field of social media studies. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, online political engagement, political dissidence and activism on social network sites, mediated publics, online communities, online social photography, fake news and satirical disinformation , and cross-ideology exposure and echo chambers. In particular, I encourage PhD proposals that use quantitative analysis techniques, such as structural equation models, social network analysis, and applications of text mining and analysis. Coming from an interdisciplinary background, I welcome applicants who are interested in applying concepts and methods in different fields of study, such as communication, computer science, politics, and sociology.
Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
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- 6 Similar Profiles
Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years
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Trialling an Emergent Working Approach to Address Equality Barriers to Collaboration with External Partners
Sledmere, M. (Co-investigator), Bueltmann, T. (Principal Investigator), Maguire, R. (Co-investigator), Miyake, E. (Co-investigator), Murphy, D. (Co-investigator), Rathnayake, C. (Co-investigator), Rodgers, P. (Co-investigator), Sanjurjo-Ramos, J. (Co-investigator), Wilson, D. (Academic) & McHugh, D. (Co-investigator)
Project: Knowledge Exchange
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Topical Diversity, Discursive Continuity, and the Engagement in Online Communities in Twitter Reactions to Acts of Extremist Violence
Rathnayake, C. (Principal Investigator)
Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland
1/08/19 → 31/12/20
Project: Research
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Towards a 'pluralist' approach for examining structures of interwoven multimodal discourse on social media
Rathnayake, C. & Suthers, D., 1 Feb 2025, In: New Media and Society. 27, 2, p. 1172-1192 21 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile2 Citations (Scopus)31 Downloads (Pure) -
Affective affordances, networked status quo and climate communication: an analysis of the mobilization of affect on Facebook
Rathnayake, C. & Winter, J. S., 17 Dec 2024, In: Social Media + Society. 10, 4, p. 1-15 15 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile
Activities
- 1 Invited talk
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Expertise and gender in times of populism: a study of government communications of COVID in Scotland and England
Higgins, M. (Speaker) & Rathnayake, C. (Contributor)
4 Feb 2021 → 5 Feb 2021Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk