Nazita Lajevardi

Nazita Lajevardi is an associate professor of political science at Michigan State University whose research centres on marginalised groups in American democracy, Islamophobia, and discrimination. She is the author of 'Outsiders at Home: The Politics of American Islamophobia.' With Cornell psychologist William Hobbs she co-authored a study published in the journal Political Behavior analysing far-right hate speech across Reddit, 4chan, and Gab in combination with hate-incident data from the FBI, the Anti-Defamation League, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The study documented a 'target substitution' effect in which, following the 2017 Unite the Right rally, the same extremist users who had voiced anti-Muslim hatred shifted toward antisemitic rhetoric, linking patterns of online and offline hate. Her work is referenced in research on how hate communities that operate in part on Reddit evolve their targets and on the connections between digital rhetoric and offline discrimination.