Sergei Pashakhin, M.A.

Sergei Pashakhin is a PhD researcher at the Chair for Digital Transformation. They are teaching courses on computational text analysis and social media in authoritarian contexts.

Sergei is a social scientist interested in the interaction of people with information and technologies in social and political contexts. For the past six years, they have been studying digital publics in Russia, the strategic use of news agendas in the Russian-Ukrainian war, and the impact of strategic narratives employed by authoritarian regimes on public trust in fake news aimed against their adversaries (neighboring countries). Their projects rely on analyses of large collections of text data, and Sergei has been developing a methodology leveraging topic modeling for extracting news agendas and frames.

Sergei was awarded their MA for the thesis "The Representation of the Ukrainian Crisis in News: Frame Analysis with Topic Modeling" by the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg. Sergei has four years of experience teaching Python programming for social science, quantitative data analysis (in R and Python), and digital social studies.

At the moment, Sergei is more proficient in English than German. Their preferred pronouns in the professional setting are they/them.