Political Science

I am a 22-year-old graduate student in the political science program at San Francisco State University. I received my B.A. from UC San Diego, majoring in political science and minoring in Middle Eastern Studies. At UC San Diego, I was a research assistant to Professor Babak Rahimi. I assisted him with a research documentary on Iran and social media. I am very familiar with the scholarly literature on the topic. I am coauthoring a chapter tiled Persian Social Networking Sites with him published in the edited volume by SUNY Press, Iran and Social Media. The world wide web and political sociology on Iran have been great areas of interests of mine, which has made me want to write my first publication on your website Balatarin, where there is is a convergence of both topics. In the San Francisco Bay Area where I grew up, I volunteered at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View where I was exposed in high school of the history and the effects the IT revolution on society. Seeing Facebook, Digg, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and Reddit develop in my literal "backyard" made me want to investigate the history and the effects IT has on society

I am a first-year doctoral student interested in the relationship between state fragility and forced migration, particularly internal displacement, with a regional focus on Africa and the Middle East. I received my B.A. with honors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008. Before graduate school I worked as a reporter in the Middle East and Washington, D.C., and spent two years managing local governance, stabilization and post-conflict assistance programs in Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Libya as a consultant for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).