Academic biography

Tanya (Tetyana) Lokot is Associate Professor in Digital Media and Society at the School of Communications. A native of Ukraine, she researches threats to digital rights, networked authoritarianism, digital resistance, internet freedom and internet governance in Eastern Europe. She is the author of Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), an in-depth study of protest and digital media in Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity.

She is currently PI (Project Coordinator) on the MEDIATIZED EU project (H2020-SC6-TRANSFORMATIONS-2020 GA no: 101004534).

Tanya's research has been published in Information, Communication & Society; Social Media + Society; Digital Journalism; Internet Policy Review; Surveillance & Society; Misinformation Review; Irish Studies in International Affairs; Partecipazione et Conflitto; Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies and Post-Soviet Affairs. She has contributed research to Freedom House's Freedom on the Net report and the Ranking Digital Rights Corporate Accountability Index. She has presented her research at multiple international conferences, including ICA, AoIR, IAMCR and ECREA. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and The Irish Independent, and she frequently contributes expert commentary to Wired, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, CodaStory and Bloomberg. She is currently the Vice-Chair of the ECREA Ukraine Task Force.

Prior to embarking on a research career, she worked as a journalist, non-profit consultant, and media trainer in Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia, and speaks fluent English, Ukrainian, and Russian. In 2014-2016, and in 2021-2022 she was contributing editor covering Eastern Europe at Global Voices and a contributor to Advox. Previously, she was Assistant Professor and Head of New Media Sequence at Mohyla School of Journalism (National University Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kyiv, Ukraine). Tanya received her PhD from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

Current research projects and initiatives:

Negotiating Networked Citizenship in Authoritarian Regimes: In January-March 2023, I was a CAIS Fellow at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum, Germany, investigating the competing interpretations and practices of networked citizenship in authoritarian regimes.

The Politics of Internet Freedom Rankings: In collaboration with Dr. Mariëlle Wijermars (Maastricht University), I am currently conducting a study on the politics of internet freedom rankings and the broader conceptualisations of internet freedom globally.

MEDIATIZED EU: Mediatised Discourses on Europeanisation and Their Representations in Public Perceptions (H2020-SC6-TRANSFORMATIONS-2020 GA no: 101004534) is a European Research and Innovation Action project that studies how the diverse media discourses across Europe are constructed to either foster or hamper the European project and how they resonate among the public, by focusing on the elite-media-pu