
Dr. Tetyana Lokot
Tetyana (Tanya) 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 (Bloomsbury, 2021), an in-depth study of protest and digital media in Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity.
She is a member of the Governing Body (since 2024) and Treasurer for ECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association). In 2026, she is a Visiting Professor at CERCEC, L'École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, France.
In 2023, she was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies in Bochum, Germany. In 2022, she was a SSSHARC Fellow at the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre, University of Sydney, Australia. She was PI on the Horizon 2020 MEDIATIZED EU project (GA no: 101004534) in 2021-2024.
Tanya's research has been published in Information, Communication & Society; Social Media + Society; Digital Journalism; Internet Policy Review; Surveillance & Society; Irish Studies in International Affairs; Media and Communication; Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies; Post-Soviet Affairs and Journal of International Relations and Development. She also co-edited the open-acess volume Mediatized Discourses on Europeanization and Their Representations in Public Perceptions (Aranzadi, 2025). 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.
Research Interests
My current research interests include networked citizenship, participatory warfare, and digital authoritarianism. My recent collaborative publications have focused on how digital media use reshapes conflict participation, grassroots knowledge production and protest movements, and how digital authoritarian practices intervene in digital rights and freedoms, platform politics, and internet governance globally.
Current research projects and initiatives:
Networked Citizenship: Transformations of Citizenship Practices, Perceptions and Norms in a Networked World: This research-in-development, supported by Enterprise Ireland, investigates how citizenship is reconfigured as an active process of constructing belonging and individual agency in a world shaped by pervasive connectivity and socio-political transformations. It examines the connection between citizen agency, rights and digital practices through theorising a novel framework of bottom-up networked citizenship.
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 conceptualise internet freedom and the real-world consequences of their ideas. The research has received funding from the Center for Advanced Internet Studies.
In 2021-2024, I was Principal Investigator for MEDIATIZED EU: Mediatised Discourses on Europeanisation and Their Representations in Public Perceptions (GA no: 101004534), a large-scale Horizon 2020-funded project that studied how the elite and media discourses across Europe are constructed to either foster or hamper the European project and how they resonate with the public. The four-year MEDIATIZED EU project, coordinated by DCU, conducted comparative research across seven European countries to reveal the impact of mediatised discourses on Europeanisation, focusing on the elite-media-public triangle.
Teaching Interests
Digital media and society; internet governance; digital authoritarianism; war, conflict and digital media
Funding Highlights
| Project Title | Role | Start date | End date |
| NetworkedCitizenship: Theorising Transformations of Citizenship Practices, Performances and Norms in a Networked World | DCU PI | 18/07/2024 | 17/07/2027 |
| The Global Politics of Internet Freedom | DCU Co-PI (with M. Wijermars) | 01/01/2024 | 31/10/2024 |
| Mediatized Discourses on Europeanization and their Representations in Public Perceptions | DCU PI | 01/12/2020 | 31/12/2024 |
| HERA Public Spaces: Culture and Integration in Europe | DCU PI | 08/03/2018 | 07/03/2019 |
| A look behind the screens: the evolving agency of the user in Irish internet policy making (IRC GOI PGR) | DCU PI (Supervisor) | 01/10/2020 | 30/09/2023 |
| Changing the shape of the environmental movement: Biodiversity Advocacy on Twitter in Ireland (IRC GOI PGR) | DCU PI (Supervisor) | 01/09/2019 | 31/08/2021 |
CV
External Positions
- Treasurer, Governing Body MemberECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association)11/09/2024 – Ongoing
Academic Qualifications
- PhDField of study: Social sciencesProject: Journalism and Media StudiesAward date: 30/05/2016
