Academic biography

Tanya (Tetyana) Lokot is Associate Professor in Digital Media and Society and Programme Chair of the MA in Social Media Communications at the School of Communications. A native of Ukraine, she researches threats to digital rights, networked authoritarianism, networked citizenship, 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). She is also a member of the ECREA Governing Body (since 2024) and Vice-Chair of the ECREA Ukraine Task Force (since 2022). 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.

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; Post-Soviet Affairs and Journal of International Relations and Development. She has presented her research at top international conferences, including ICA, AoIR, IAMCR, ECPR 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: As part of my 2023 Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum, Germany, I began investigating the competing interpretations and practices of networked citizenship in authoritarian regimes. I am now continuing work on understanding networked citizenship in a global context.

The Global Politics of Internet Freedom: In collaboration with Dr. Mariëlle Wijermars (Maastricht University), the project analyses how various groups of actors – the tech and academic community, non-profit advocacy organisations, states and corporations – have influenced how we