I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. My dissertation focuses on social media use and religious identity change. Specifically, I focus on the experience of Muslim Arab women who use social media while becoming more religious despite possible rejection from their immediate environment. 
My recent work focuses on identity and media use among Arabs in Israel. This research population can be investigated to understand individual and collective identity-formation in times of personal and social crises while witnessing the ongoing development of media technologies.

Research Interests

Identity

Digital religion

New media

Narratives

Selected Publication

Birkner, T., Agbarya, A., Meyers, O., & Somerstein, R. (2022). The News Media and the Ever-Present Fear in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. In Media and the Dissemination of Fear (pp. 129-152). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Agbarya, A., & John, N. (2021). Online tie and content management and changing religious identity among Muslim Arab women in Israel. Information, Communication & Society, 1-16.

John, N., & Agbarya, A. (2021). Punching up or turning away? Palestinians unfriending Jewish Israelis on Facebook. New Media & Society, 23(5), 1063-1079.

Lewis, N., Martinez, L. S., Agbarya, A., & Piatok-Vaisman, T. (2016). Examining patterns and motivations for drug-related information seeking and scanning behavior: A cross-national comparison of American and Israeli college students. Communication Quarterly, 64(2), 145-172

Awards and Prizes

PhD Endowment Grant of The Smart institute, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 2021.

Tamkeen initiative, for The relationship between the Palestinian researcher and research participants at home: a double look (in Arabic). 2020

Mada al-Carmel Arab Center for Applied Social Studies, Haifa. 2019.