Ahrabhi Kathirgamalingam

Hi. I am a research associate at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (Germany) in the research groups ‘Social Cohesion in Digital Media Environments’ and ‘Research Data and Methods’. As a PhD student at the ‘Computational Communication Science Lab’ at the University of Vienna, I am investigating the chances and challenges of automating racism detection in textual data. Further, I am an external lecturer at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. My research interests include political phenomena such as polarization and migration in mediated discourses, as well as methodological questions relating to social bias and Computational Social Science.

recent.

10.10.2025 - Moderation / Academic Freedom: Foundations for the Future / with Ina Brandes (Minister for Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia) , Manfred Bayer (TU Dortmund, Germany), Katrin Weller (Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany | GESIS, Germany) & Tim Majchrzak (CAIS, Germany) / Creating Spaces for Digital Futures at Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS), Bochum, Germany

09.10.2025 - Paper Presentation / Unpacking the Blame Game? Opportunities and Barriers to Automated Detection of Blame Attribution in News Media / Creating Spaces for Digital Futures at Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS), Bochum, Germany

28.08.2025 - Paper Presentation / Deepening Inequalities or Bridging Divides? Tracing Racist Language in German News Media Over Time / Panel: Representation at the Crossroads: The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion in Media and Parliamentary Debates / ECPR General Conference 2025 at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

15. & 16.05.2025 -Poster Presentation / Tracing Racism in Textual Data: A CSS Perspective / CSS & Inequality at University of Mannheim, Germany

13.05.2025 - Workshop / From Awareness to Action: Addressing Discrimination and Power in Academia / Qualification Programme Digitalisation Research at Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS), Germany (hybrid)

26.04.2025 – Roundtable Discussion / Marginalized Voices and Perspectives in Computational Methods / with Angelie Kraft (weizenbaum, Germany) & Indira Sen (University of Mannheim, Germany) / 7th Annual Conference of COMPTEXT at University of Vienna, Austria

latest publications.

Kathirgamalingam, A., Lind, F., & Boomgaarden, H. G. (2025). Measuring racism and related concepts using computational text-as-data approaches: a systematic literature review. Annals of International Communication Association, wlaf013, https://doi.org/10.1093/anncom/wlaf013

Lind, F., Song, H., Boomgaarden, H. G., Kathirgamalingam, A., Song, H., Syed Ali, K., & Vliegenthart, R. (2025). Research Practices in Comparative Communication Research: Visibility, Topical and Geographical Disparities, and their Longitudinal Patterns. International Journal of Communication, 19(26), 1103-1128. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/23510

Kathirgamalingam, A., Lind, F., Bernhard-Harrer, J., & Boomgaarden, H. G. (2024). Agree to Disagree? Human and LLM coder bias for constructs of marginalization. [Preprint] https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/agpyr