University of Gothenburg
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Anton Törnberg

Senior Lecturer

Department of Sociology and Work
Science
Mail
anton.tornberg@gu.se
Visiting address
Skanstorget 18
41122 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 720
40530 Göteborg

About Anton Törnberg

Anton Törnberg is an Associate Professor in Sociology and employed as a lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Work Science.

He defended his thesis in 2017 titled "The wicked nature of social systems – a complexity approach to sociology". It explores the connection between sociology and complexity theory, and how theoretical perspectives and methods from complexity science can be useful in analyzing and understanding social systems. A particular focus is on social movements and political uprisings. He has previously worked at the Department of Physical Resource Theory at Chalmers University of Technology, and was a researcher at the European Centre for Living Technology (ECLT) at Ca'Foscari University of Venice, Italy.

Specialist Fields

  • Right-wing extremism
  • Online radicalization
  • Social media and digital data
  • Big data and NLP
  • Critical/complex realism
  • Social network analysis

Current Research

Anton's research primarily focuses on right-wing extremist movements on the Internet, with an emphasis on radicalization processes, and the diffusion of xenophobic rhetoric. In his research, Anton Törnberg combines different methods within machine learning such as topic modeling, word embedding, and sentiment analysis along with qualitative text analysis to study large amounts of digital data. He also combines social network analysis with text analysis to study how concepts and discourses spread in digital networks.

  • Anton is the project leader for the project "Politically motivated crime against immigrants in Sweden: When, where, and how?", funded by the Swedish Research Council. Participating researchers include Mattias Wahlström (GU) and Måns Lundstedt (GU).
  • He is also a participating researcher in the research project "In the Eye of the Storm. Climate adaptation in times of increasing polarization and disinformation" (FORMAS), along with Martin Hultman (Chalmers) and Johan Söderberg (GU).

Collaboration

Anton has worked on several projects at the Department of Physical Resource Theory at Chalmers, including the INSITE and ED-FET project Emergence by Design, which is about innovation dynamics and technical change. He has also organized an interdisciplinary doctoral course in Social Network Analysis along with two colleagues at the Physical Resource Theory. Anton has been a guest researcher at the University of Amsterdam, at ECLT in Venice, and at UMASS, Massachusetts.