Across my work, I return to the ways public scrutiny develops on social media and to what happens when attention shifts from what a public actor has done to who that person is understood to be. The cases differ—politicians, members of royal institutions, athletes, media figures and people involved in institutional controversies—but they reveal related pressures surrounding authority, visibility, identity and belonging.
My research approaches these questions at different scales. Some studies follow the detail of a single controversy; others compare larger collections of posts and comments across languages, countries and platforms. Words are considered alongside images, humour, memes and platform conventions. Taken together, the work combines close qualitative interpretation with corpus-based and statistical analysis, allowing recurring patterns to be tested without losing the social and cultural contexts in which they acquire meaning.
I draw on critical discourse analysis and systemic functional linguistics, combining qualitative interpretation with corpus-based, multimodal and statistical analysis.
My doctoral thesis by publication examines how hostile evaluation is used to contest political and symbolic authority on X. It treats conflict talk as the broader discourse phenomenon and hostile political evaluation as the mechanism through which public figures are assessed in relation to morality, truthfulness, competence, resolve, normality, authenticity and legitimacy.
Across three published studies, the project moves from an analysis of Spanish hostile replies to Isabel Díaz Ayuso, to a multimodal study of Queen Letizia and King Felipe VI during the 2024 DANA crisis, and then to a Spanish–Italian comparison of Ayuso and Giorgia Meloni.
The project addresses a persistent analytical problem: hostility is often identified through explicit insults or isolated linguistic features, although attacks on public authority frequently emerge through combinations of evaluation, intensification, identity positioning, imagery and other semiotic resources. To account for these combinations, the thesis develops the concept of configurational hostile evaluation. This approach makes less explicit forms of delegitimation analytically visible and helps explain how digital disagreement can develop into attacks on credibility, legitimacy and the right to exercise public authority.
My research has developed through participation in competitive projects addressing aggressive language, political conflict, gendered evaluation and digital violence across social-media platforms.
My current work extends this programme through multilingual and cross-platform comparison, recognition and institutional belonging, visual forms of public scrutiny, transparent human–AI annotation, AI-mediated social-media discourse, and generative AI in language education.