Tanya (Tetyana) Lokot is Associate Professor in Digital Media and Society at the School of Communications and Programme Chair of the MA in Social Media 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). In 2022, she was a SSSHARC Fellow at the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre, University of Sydney, Australia. In 2023, she was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies in Bochum, Germany. She is also the Vice-Chair of the ECREA Ukraine Task Force.

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; Media and Communication; Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies and Post-Soviet Affairs. She has presented her research at top 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 has contributed research to Freedom House's Freedom on the Net report and the Ranking Digital Rights Corporate Accountability Index. In 2014-2016 and in 2021-2022, she was contributing editor covering Eastern Europe at Global Voices and a contributor to Advox. 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.

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), we are studying 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-public triangle. Kicking off in 2021, the four-year MEDIATIZED EU project, coordinated by DCU, conducts comparative research across seven European countries to reveal the impact of mediatised discourses on Europeanisation.

Interdisciplinary Digital Research Group: This is a new initiative within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at DCU, led by Dr Dónal Mulligan, Dr Clark Powers and Dr Tanya Lokot. The purpose of the initiative is to develop a collaborative space for inquiry and applied research that is dedicated to openness in terms of disciplinary perspective, theory, and methodology, and that is committed to critical and grounded approaches to understanding the human world of the present, past, and future.

REDEHOPE: Reliable Data for Evidence-Based Housing Policies: This collaborative project seeks to better understand how geographically varied ‘data cultures’ (i.e. variegated representations, values, norms, epistemologies, practices, infrastructures, standards, power structures, etc, through which data is produced and used) inform the monitoring of progress towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly as they relate to the provision of affordable housing.