Photo of Kennedy, Ian

Ian Kennedy, PhD

Assistant Professor

Sociology

Pronouns: They/Them

Contact

Building & Room:

BSB 4132

Address:

1007 W. Harrison St

Office Phone:

(312)-355-8335

CV Download:

Kennedy CV August 2023

About

Ian Kennedy is a computational social scientist trained working at the intersection of race, digital platforms, and text analysis. Their work aims to contribute to understandings of how contemporary racism, sexism, and transphobia works, in both visible and less visible ways. This means looking for data in new places, like in Craigslist rental ad texts, by developing new uses for large-scale administrative data, or curating large samples of twitter data linked to election misinformation, or through analysis of millions of reddit comments. They are committed to producing useful work beyond scholarly publications, working with groups like the Northwest Justice Project to identify illegal Craigslist ads or with the Election Integrity Partnership to monitor misinformation during the 2020 election.

Research Interests

Residential Segregation, Online Misinformation, Critical Race Theory, Inequality and the Digital World, Gender and Sexuality

Ongoing Projects

Networks of Gendered Discourse on Reddit - Using a dataset of billions of reddit comments, our team is working to identify networked communities on Reddit and describe how those communities discuss, debate, and do gender online. In collaboration with Hannah Curtis and Leo G. Stewart.

Measuring Racial Residential Segregation Using Socially-Salient Named Neighborhoods as Areal Units - Segregation measures usually rely on Census tracts for their calculations, but tracts do not necessarily capture the social structure of space. We use user-generated neighborhood names from rental advertisements on Craigslist to created socially salient neighborhood spaces and compare traditional segregation metrics in those spaces with the same metrics calculated with census tracts. Here are some of the maps. In collaboration with Kyle Crowder.