Danial Vahabli

Mentioning the unmentionable: Perception of opportunities, agency, emotions, and identity in Iranian resistance rap prior and during the women, life, freedom uprisings
August 2025
Volume 111
Danial Vahabli

Read here.

I specifically analyze the role of Iranian rap in the Women, Life, Freedom movement.
This paper has previously received the Conflict, Social Action, and Change's Graduate Student Paper Award from The Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP).

Such spaces are labelled as "discursive nonmovements" which first provide an opportunity for dissidents to create loose solidarity networks around shared struggles and second can activate in opportune times to share radical protest discourse horizontally overnight. /2

‼️ New Paper Alert ‼️
In this paper I investigate the role of accessible discursive spaces in media and arts under authoritarianism in social movements providing a third space in between the hidden and public transcript to publicly articulate grievances. /1
authors.elsevier.com/a/1lM-A,6w-Y...

Thank you for your help and kind words.

prior and during the Women, Life, Freedom uprisings, and demonstrate how DIY and independent discursive spaces such as Iranian rap provide a crucial space for discursive resistance under authoritarianism.

Special thanks to @burrata.bsky.social , @nickhwilson.bsky.social , and @dryzhang.bsky.social

The award is for the paper titled "Mentioning the Unmentionable: Perception of Opportunities, Agency, Emotions, and Identity in Iranian Resistance Rap prior and during the Women, Life, Freedom Uprisings."

In this paper, I investigate the transition of socially conscious Iranian rap..
2/3

I am honored to announced that I've received the Conflict, Social Action, and Change Division's Graduate Student Paper Award from The Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) @sssp1org.bsky.social . 1/3

Interesting article on the perceptions of human rights. Studying the meanings of human rights for ordinary individuals is absolutely necessary for transnational advocacy.

Our article on using LLMs for text classification is out now in SMR! 🤖🧑‍💻💬

We compare different learning regimes, from zero-shot to instruction-tuning, and share recommendations for sociologists and other social scientists interested in using these models.

doi.org/10.1177/0049...

Talked about discursive resistance under authoritarianism today. #ESS2025

#ESS2025
Talked about hashtag activism for global attention today.

Identity diversification and homogenization: evidence from frequent estimates of similarity of self-authored, self-descriptive text - Journal of Computational Social Science For more than a decade, individuals composed and edited self-authored self-descriptions as social media biographies. Did these identities become more diverse over time because of a “rise in individual...

❗❗❗New Paper Alert with @jason-jones.bsky.social

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Are social media bios getting more unique or more alike?

Our current self drifts away from our past self – quickly at first, then more gradually. Evidence from US Twitter profile bios 2012-2022, more results in the paper: jasonjones.ninja/pap...

Identity diversification and homogenization: evidence from frequent estimates of similarity of self-authored, self-descriptive text - Journal of Computational Social Science For more than a decade, individuals composed and edited self-authored self-descriptions as social media biographies. Did these identities become more diverse over time because of a “rise in individual...

📝📊 Are social media bios getting more unique or more alike?

A study of Twitter bios (2012–2022) found that wording became more diverse, but meanings became more similar over time, suggesting both individualism & social conformity.

🔗 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

#SciComm #SocialMedia 🧪

Just received an R&R! 2025 is going great!

Just deactivated my Twitter account. Hopefully this platform will take off.

Hello all,
I'm Danial Vahabli, a third year sociology PhD student at Stony Brook University broadly interested in investigating international media coverage of protests using computational methods. I'll listed my most recent paper here. Let's connect!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...