Aman Abhishek

Bio

Hi, I am an Assistant Professor in the Communication & Media Department, IE University, Madrid, Spain. My research is at the intersection of journalism, activism, and technology.

I am currently working on two major projects. The first focuses on activists using cameras for documenting human rights violations and seeking accountability, and is based on two years of ethnography in Israel/Palestine. The second is about journalists, activists, and technologists using leaked and hacked material for investigating and exposing wrongdoing, and is based on more than three years of fieldwork across Europe and the US.

I have also published research on dis/misinformation, media regulation in India, online social movements, and investigative data journalism. All my research articles are available below.

I completed my Ph.D. in mass communications from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, in 2026. Initially, I had enrolled in the Ph.D. program in physics at UW-Madison after finishing my B.Sc.-M.Sc. in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee, India. Back then, I was working in the field of particle physics, which seeks to understand the fundamental building blocks of the universe, and during this time I had the privilege of working at CERN and with the scientific community around the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. Joining the physics Ph.D. program at UW-Madison made me think about where my career is headed. Even though physics is an amazing subject, I felt unsettled about my work not having any direct social relevance. After two years of thinking and exploring, I decided to switch fields.

Articles

Research

  1. Abhishek, A. & Graves, L. (2024). Analyzing Code: What a Critical Code Studies Approach Reveals About the Epistemology of Data Journalism. Digital Journalism.
  2. Abhishek, A. (2022). The State Deputizing Citizens to Discipline Digital News Media: The Case of the IT Rules 2021 in India. Digital Journalism.
  3. Abhishek, A. (2021). Overlooking the political economy in the research on propaganda. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review.
  4. Lukito, J., Sarma, P., Foley, J., Abhishek, A., Bucy, E., Doroshenko, L., Sun, Z., Pevehouse, J., Sethares, W., Shah, D. (2021). Resonant Moments in Media Events: Discursive Shifts, Agenda Control, and Twitter Dynamics in the First Clinton-Trump Debate. Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media.
  5. Ghosh, S., Su, M. H., Abhishek, A., Suk, J., Tong, C., Kamath, K., Hills, O., Correa, T., Garlough, C., Borah, P., & Shah, D. (2020). Covering #MeToo across the News Spectrum: Political Accusation and Public Events as Drivers of Press Attention. The International Journal of Press/Politics.
  6. Zhang, Y., Shah, D., Foley, J., Abhishek, A., Lukito, J., Suk, J., Kim, S. J., Sun, Z., Pevehouse, J., & Garlough, C. (2019). Whose Lives Matter? Mass Shootings and Social Media Discourses of Sympathy and Policy, 2012–2014. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.
  7. Suk, J., Abhishek, A., Zhang, Y., Ahn, S. Y., Correa, T., Garlough, C., & Shah, D. V. (2019). #MeToo, Networked Acknowledgment, and Connective Action: How “Empowerment Through Empathy” Launched a Social Movement. Social Science Computer Review.
  8. Lukito, J., Sarma, P. K., Foley, J., & Abhishek, A. (2019). Using time series and natural language processing to identify viral moments in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Debate. Third Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science.

Contact

Email: aman.abhishek[at]ie.edu (official but not private)
Personal email: a.kmjgs[at]passfwd.com (more secure)
Signal: mango.50 (most secure)
Mailing Address: Paseo de la Castellana 259E, IE Tower, 28046 Madrid, Spain.

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