About Saskia Poulter
I am an MPhil student in Comparative Government at Hertford College, Oxford. My research focusses on how energy sanctions shape trade dependencies among autocratic states, with a particular focus on the role of clandestine ’dark shipments’ of oil and liquid natural gas. I am keenly interested in political methodology and, in my thesis, hope to explore the application of machine learning and geospatial imaging techniques for the detection of illicit maritime trade.
My Laidlaw project ('Smelling the Coffee: Discursive Ecologies and Maximalist Moderation in an Alt-Right Reddit Community') used natural language processing and difference-in-difference analysis to assess the effects of interventionist digital platform regulation on online hate speech.