My Ph.D. research will explore the realm of social media to answer this question, ‘To what extent and how does Facebook produce affective polarisation in the contemporary one-party state context of Cuba?’ In addition to that, this project proposes to use Facebook as a site for ethnographic fieldwork in order to study how affective polarisation in one-party states may have political and social consequences for individuals and states. Employing a transdisciplinary mixed method approach or a qualitative-quantitative methodology, this project will help understand the complexity of affective polarization beyond the binary division assumed by most studies on the topic. I will also use sentiment analysis techniques, multimodal discourse analysis, online surveys, and interviews to provide a comprehensive picture of the relationship between social media and affective polarization in one-party states.
