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 Associate Professor in Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Work Science.

He earned his PhD in 2017 with the dissertation “The Wicked Nature of Social Systems – A Complexity Approach to Sociology.” The thesis explores the relationship between sociology and complexity theory, showing how theoretical perspectives and methods from complexity science can help analyze and understand social systems. A particular emphasis is placed on social movements and political uprisings.

Listen to an interview with Anton on Sociologipodden about right-wing extremism online: https://play.gu.se/media/26.%20H%C3%B6gerextremism%20p%C3%A5%20n%C3%A4tet/0_mi9gkzr0

Research Areas

  • Right-wing extremism
  • Online radicalization
  • Politically motivated violence
  • Misinformation/Disinformation
  • Polarization
  • Social media
  • Big data and Natural Language Processing (NLP)
  • Social network analysis

 

Current Research

Anton’s research primarily focuses on far-right movements on the Internet, with an emphasis on radicalization processes and violent-extremist and xenophobic rhetoric. His work combines methods in machine learning—such as topic modeling, word embeddings, and Large Language Models (LLMs)—with qualitative text analysis to study large-scale digital corpora. He also integrates social network analysis with text analysis to investigate how concepts and discourses spread across digital networks.

He also participates in the following research projects:

 

Collaboration

Anton has worked on several projects at the Division of Physical Resource Theory, Chalmers University of Technology, including INSITE and the EU FET project Emergence by Design on innovation dynamics and technological change. He has been a research fellow (assegno di ricerca) at the European Centre for Living Technology (ECLT), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and a visiting researcher at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and UMass, Massachusetts.

Teaching and Supervision

He teaches criminology, social psychology, and general sociology, with emphasis on social movements, political violence, sociology of knowledge, and both qualitative and quantitative methods.  He teaches at all levels and has organized several international doctoral courses, including on automatic text analysis, far-right movements, and social network analysis (SNA). He is currently developing a Master’s course in digital methods for the social sciences, planned for Autumn 2026.

Anton supervises several PhD candidates, primarily in sociology and theory of science.

Elsewhere

Google Scholar

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