I was thrilled to join host and fellow academic Steven Seegel for a New Books Network podcast to talk about my new book, Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent. We had a wide-ranging conversation about protest dynamics, internet and social media, witnessing and memory, media and internet freedom in Ukraine and Russia, digital citizenship, and much more!
The book examines how citizens in countries with limited media freedom and corrupt authorities perceive the affordances of digital media for protest and how these enable or limit protest action depending on the political and social context.
The book is mostly focused on the 2013-2014 protests in Ukraine, but it reflects on augmented dissent more broadly and draws connections with other more recent events, e.g. protest campaigns in Russia.
The book is based on extensive research and fieldwork, but also builds on the work of many wonderful protest, activism and digital media scholars, such as Katy Pearce, Sarah Oates, Olga Onuch, Zeynep Tufekçi, Tetyana Bohdanova, Jennifer Earl, Rebecca MacKinnon, Andrew Chadwick, Samuel Greene and many others.
I want to especially thank the amazing scholars who I admire and whose work I was inspired by for their endorsements of the book: Sarah Oates, Ethan Zuckerman, Olga Onuch, and Samuel Greene.
I am incredibly grateful to Laura Portwood-Stacer of Manuscript Works for helping me develop and improve my early drafts, to series editors Ruth Sanz Sabido and Stuart Price, and to my publisher Rowman & Littlefield International for pulling through despite the difficult year that 2020 has been.
Tanya Lokot 