Tom Einhorn

Social Movements · Political Sociology · Computational Social Science

I am a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of British Columbia. I study how social movements evolve, and particularly what happens after they win. Using computational methods and large-scale text data, I try to understand the cultural dynamics of collective action: what holds movements together, how they change, and what happens to them once they get what they want.

My dissertation follows the post-victory trajectory of the American LGBTQ movement after marriage equality, drawing on an original dataset of nearly 600,000 Facebook posts and a series of interviews with LGBTQ activists across the country. Combining natural language inference, topic modelling, and network analysis, I examine how victory unsettles the cultural fabric of a movement and how it is remade through contestation and negotiation in the aftermath.

Beyond the dissertation, I am involved in several projects that bring computational social science approaches to political and comparative-historical sociology. With Kimberly Huyser and Mary Jessome, I am part of a project using natural language inference to trace the history of settler colonialism in Canadian law, regulation, and legislation from the nineteenth century to the present. And with Laura Nelson, I am part of a Schmidt Sciences-supported project asking ahat large language models “know” about history and whether we can use LLMs to represent the past.

Methodologically, I am drawn to adapting novel computational tools for questions in social movement studies, political sociology, and comparative-historical analysis.