Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent is my current book project, slated to be published some time in the spring of 2021. The book draws on fieldwork interviews and online ethnographic research in Ukraine and Russia to explain the role of networked media and technologies in how people protest.
Interdisciplinary Digital Research Group: This a new initiative within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at DCU. 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.
MEDIATIZED EU: Mediatised Discourses on Europeanisation and Their Representations in Public Perceptions is a European Research and Innovation Action research project that will study 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 project will conduct comparative research across seven European countries to reveal the specifics of such mediatisation of political discourses on Europeanisation, including the so-called old and new European states such as Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Hungary, and Eastern Partnership countries such as Georgia. The MEDIATIZED EU project (H2020-SC6-TRANSFORMATIONS-2020 GA no: 101004534) is funded by the EU under the Research and Innovation Actions grant scheme. The EU funding will support four years of research across seven countries, along with a series of public events, conferences, and open-access publications.
REDEHOPE: Reliable Data for Evidence-Based Housing Policies: This 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. Based on the rigorous study of existing data ecologies in several target countries, the project intends to develop a diagnostic tool to help countries identify issues in their housing data ecology, respond appropriately to such issues and access appropriate dataset to formulate more robust, evidence-based housing policies for the benefit of people.
Ranking Digital Rights Corporate Accountability Index: the project works to promote freedom of expression and privacy on the internet by creating global standards and incentives for companies to respect and protect users’ rights. The RDR team ranks the world’s most powerful internet, mobile, and telecommunications companies on relevant commitments and policies, based on international human rights standards. I contribute research on the Russian companies in the Index.
FakeNewsProject: This is a network project run by an informal international team of researchers from different countries, including myself. The research goal is to understand what influences individuals’ trust in news and their ability to detect fakes. For more information see the project page.
Tanya Lokot 