Dr. Ashwini Ashokkumar

Biography

Ashwini Ashokkumar studies how identities shape political discourse. Her research examines how identity processes impact political discourse and discussion, and how discourse shapes social cohesion, intergroup relations, and democracy. She combines traditional social psychology methods, such as surveys and experiments, with computational social science methods—including language analysis and big data approaches—to study identity, politics, and language in controlled naturalistic settings. Ashwini is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University. She completed her PhD in Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2021 and was also an Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University before arriving at Harvard.

Research Interests