Ashwini Ashokkumar

Ashwini studies how our identities shape (and are shaped by) how we think about, talk about, and do politics. Her research examines how identity processes impact political discourse and discussion, and how discourse, in turn, shapes social cohesion, intergroup relations, and democracy. She combines traditional social psychology methods (surveys, experiments) with computational social science methods (language analysis, big data approaches) to study identity, politics, and language in both controlled and naturalistic settings.

Ashwini is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She received her PhD in Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2021, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford University. Before arriving at Harvard, she was an Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University.