Academic Profile

People Feature

Will Allen

Non-Stipendiary Research Fellow
British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Politics and International Relations

I am a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and non-stipendiary research fellow at Nuffield College. My current project, 'Do Facts Still Matter? Examining the Importance of Information for Migration Attitudes', combines computational media analysis, experiments, and counterfactual modelling of global survey data to consider how and for whom factual knowledge about migration matters for political behaviour.

I completed my DPhil in Politics at DPIR with the support of an ESRC Advanced Quantitative Methods studentship, and an MPhil in Development Studies at the Oxford Department of International Development (ODID) as a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation graduate scholar. My dissertation 'Messaging Migration' received the 2020 Lord Bryce Prize for Comparative Politics from the UK Political Studies Association and the 2020 Thomas E. Patterson award from the Political Communication section of the American Political Science Association.

Previously, I was a Supernumerary (Career Development) Teaching Fellow at St John's College, Fellow by Examination (Junior Research Fellow) at Magdalen College, and a Mann Senior Scholar at Hertford College. I also have nearly a decade of research and public engagement experience with Oxford's Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS), including The Migration Observatory and The Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity.

Research

My research agenda, spanning Europe and Latin America, examines how and why people engage with information about economic and political issues--particularly on migration, and through media--and what this means for broader politics and policymaking. Strands within this agenda include:

  • analysing textual, visual, and multimodal content, and finding effective ways of doing so at scale
  • identifying changes in policymakers' agendas, and linking these with dynamics in public opinion and media coverage
  • measuring how political and issue-specific knowledge relates to attitudes and preferences
  • developing and testing information-based interventions

I also have interests in research methods and developing more effective public engagement with social science, with a focus on:

  • experimental methods including conjoint designs
  • computational social science
  • visual methods
  • knowledge exchange and impact

Selected Professional Service

Editorial and Reviewing Work

Associate Editor, Journal of Refugee Studies (2021--)
Associate Editor, Evidence & Policy (2019--)
Appointed Member, ESRC Peer Review College (2024--) and AHRC Peer Review College (2022--)

University and Departmental Work

Co-Convenor (2022-24) and DPIR Representative, Social Science Division Research Staff Forum (2021-24)
Early-Career Representative, DPIR Research Committee (2021--)
Public Engagement with Research Leader, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford (2019-21)

Will Allen I
Attribution:

David Fisher (Fisher Studios Ltd)

  • E:  william.allen@politics.ox.ac.uk
    X:  @williamlallen
  • Department of Politics and International Relations
    Manor Rd
    Oxford
    OX1 3UQ

  •  

Publications

Refereed Journal Articles

Allen, William, Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij, Heather Rolfe, and Johnny Runge (2024). Communicating Economic Evidence About Immigration Changes Attitudes and Policy Preferences. International Migration Review, 58(1): 266-295

Allen, William, Isabel Ruiz, and Carlos Vargas-Silva (2024). Policy Preferences in Response to Large Forced Migration Inflows. World Development, 174: 1-13

Allen, William, Justyna Bandola-Gill, and Sotiria Grek (2024). Next Slide Please: The Politics of Visualization During COVID-19 Press Briefings. Journal of European Public Policy, 33(1): 729-755

Jhoti, Anya and William Allen (2024). Visual Bordering: How Refugee-Serving Organizations Represent Refugees on Instagram. New Media & Society: 1-25 (FirstView)

Ahlstrom-Vij, Kristoffer and William Allen (2023). As We Like It: Did the UK’s 2016 EU Referendum Reveal the Will of the People? PS: Political Science and Politics, 56(4): 560-565

Allen, William (2021). The Conventions and Politics of Migration Data Visualizations. New Media & Society, 25(6): 1313–1334

Xiang, Biao, William Allen, Shahram Khosravi, Mukta Naik, Yasmin Ortiga, Karen Anne S Liao, Hélène Kringelbach, Jorge Cuéllar, Lamea Momen, and Priya Deshingkar (2023). Shock Mobilities During Moments of Acute Uncertainty. Geopolitics, 28(4): 1632-1657

Allen, William and Evan Easton-Calabria (2022). Combining Computational and Archival Methods to Study International Organizations: Refugees and the International Labour Organization, 1919-2015. International Studies Quarterly: 66(3): sqac044

Broadhead, Jacqueline and William Allen (2022). How Universities Facilitate City Network Socialization Through Knowledge Exchange on Immigrant Integration. Global Networks: 22(3): 430-446

Landis, Benjamin Till and William Allen (2021). Cascading Activation Revisited: How Audiences Contribute to News Agendas Using Social Media. Digital Journalism: 10(4): 537-555

Allen, William and Scott Blinder (2018). Media Independence Through Routine Press-State Relations: Immigration and Government Statistics in the British Press. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 23(2): 202-226

Allen, William (2018). Visual Brokerage: Communicating Data and Research Through Visualisation. Public Understanding of Science, 27(8): 906-922

Allen, William, Bridget Anderson, Nicholas Van Hear, Madeleine Sumption, Franck Düvell, Jennifer Hough, Lena Rose, Rachel Humphris, and Sarah Walker (2018). Who Counts in Crises? The New Geopolitics of International Migration and Refugee Governance.Geopolitics, 23(1): 217-243

Allen, William (2017). Making Corpus Data Visible: Visualising Text With Research Intermediaries. Corpora, 12(3): 459-482

Allen, William (2017). Factors that Impact How Civil Society Intermediaries Perceive Evidence. Evidence & Policy, 13(2): 183-200
--Winner of the 2016 Carol Weiss Prize, Best Early-Career Paper, Evidence & Policy

Kennedy, Helen, Rosemary Lucy Hill, William Allen, and Andy Kirk (2016). Engaging with (Big) Data Visualizations: Factors That Affect Engagement and Resulting New Definitions of Effectiveness. First Monday, 21(11), November

Kennedy, Helen, Rosemary Lucy Hill, Giorgia Aiello, and William Allen (2016). The Work That Visualisation Conventions Do. Information, Communication & Society, 19(6): 715-735

Blinder, Scott and William Allen (2016). Constructing Immigrants: Portrayals of Migrant Groups in British National Newspapers, 2010-2012.International Migration Review, 50(1): 3-40

Allen, William (2015). ‘We Are Sitting on a Time Bomb’: A Multiperspectival Approach to Inter-National Development at an East African Border. Geopolitics, 20(2): 381-403

Allen, William (2013). ‘I am From Busia!’: Everyday Trading and Health Service Provision at the Kenya-Uganda Border as Place-Making Activities. Journal of Borderlands Studies, 28(3): 291-306.

 

Chapters in Edited Volumes

Easton-Calabria, Evan and William Allen (2023). ‘Connecting computational text analysis with archival methods: an iterative approach', in F. Badache, L. R. Kimber, and L. Maeterns (eds.), International Organization and Research Methods: An Introduction, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, pp. 285-291

Allen, William (2022). ‘Applying computational linguistic and text analysis to media content about migration', in E. E. Korkmaz, A. A. Salah, and T. Bircan (eds.), Data Science for Migration and Mobility Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 352-365

Allen, William (2021). ‘The practice and politics of migration data visualization', in M. McAuliffe (ed.), Handbook on Migration and Technology, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp.50-69

Kennedy, Helen, William Allen, Martin Engebretsen, Rosemary Lucy Hill, Andy Kirk, and Wibke Weber (2021). ‘Data visualisations: Newsroom trends and everyday engagements', in J. Gray and L. Bounegru (eds.), The Data Journalism Handbook 2: Towards a Critical Data Practice, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp.162-173

Allen, William (2020). ‘Mobility, media, and data politics’, in K. Smets, K. Leurs, M. Georgiou, S. Witteborn, and R. Gajjala (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration, London: SAGE, pp. 180-91

Allen, William, Scott Blinder, and Robert McNeil (2019). ‘Informing realities: Research, public opinion, and media reports on migration', in J. Palme, M. Ruhs, and K. Tamas (eds.), Bridging the Gaps: Linking Research to Public Debates and Policymaking on Migration and Integration, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 50-65

Kennedy, Helen and William Allen (2017). ‘Data visualisation as an emerging tool for online research’, in N.G. Fielding, R.M. Lee and G. Blank (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Online Research Methods, 2ndedition, London: SAGE.

Allen, William, Scott Blinder, and Robert McNeil (2017). ‘Media reporting on migrants and migration’, in M. Ruhs and M. McAuliffe (eds), World Migration Report 2018: Making Sense of Migration and Mobility in an Increasingly Inter-Connected World, Geneva: International Organization for Migration.