Negotiating Networked Citizenship in Authoritarian Regimes
The key aim of this research project is to explore the growing connection between citizenship, human rights, and digital rights evident in the emergence of the new concept of “networked citizenship”. Grounded in the pervasive datafication and digitisation of everyday life, it offers the promise of empowering citizens to “practice” citizenship in new, seamless and creative ways. Yet in authoritarian regimes, which increasingly rely on sophisticated technological tools and digital systems to preserve legitimacy, networked citizenship can also come to mean state capture of citizen data, surveillance of citizens, and greater control over people’s digital and material identities. Using the case of Russia, the project aims to trace key dynamics, affordances and forces shaping how relevant actors (state bodies, corporations, rights advocates and citizens) negotiate and co-construct networked citizenship in authoritarian regimes. The project will entail a multi-modal analysis of existing policy and legislative documents, existing digital governance initiatives, relevant scholarly and public opinion data, digital rights campaigns, and social media discourses to capture the interplay of competing and overlapping interpretations of networked citizenship by the regime and other actors. While this project explores the particular context of Russia as an increasingly networked authoritarian state, the expected findings and conceptual development will contribute to theorising about networked citizenship more broadly and will have relevance for other authoritarian contexts as well.
Main Results
My project, Negotiating Networked Citizenship in Authoritarian Regimes, generated several key outcomes in 2023.
In February 2023, I convened a workshop at CAIS on Understanding Citizenship in the Networked Era bringing together researchers working on different aspects of digital politics, internet governance and datafied society for an interdisciplinary dialogue about the promises and perils of networked citizenship.
My CAIS research contributed to a draft manuscript focusing on Russia as a case study and, in particular, proposing a comparative approach to the study of privacy in networked authoritarian settings as a key aspect of networked citizenship. The manuscript highlights the relational and contextual nature of privacy while also recognizing the specificities of state-citizen and state-platform dynamics in countries with diminishing digital rights and freedoms. The abstract has been accepted for publication in a special issue of Social Media + Society “Comparative Approaches To Studying Privacy: Opening Up New Perspectives”.
I am working on another paper idea and also preparing a policy op-ed based on my analysis of the state and civic discourses on internet policy and information security in Russia and my resulting conceptualisation of the divergent imaginaries of networked citizenship which I have pitched to several potential outlets.
Finally, I am working on expanding my CAIS research project into an ERC Starter grant proposal application.
Main Research Topics
- Internet governance
- Digital rights
- Digital democracy
- Networked citizenship
- Networked authoritarianism
Curriculum Vitae
- September 2022: SSSHARC Visiting Fellow, Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre, University of Sydney, Australia
- 2021-present: Associate Professor in Digital Media and Society, School of Communications, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
- 2016-2020: Assistant Professor, School of Communications, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
- 2012-2016: PhD Researcher, Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland, College Park, USA
- 2004-2012: Assistant Professor/Head of New Media Sequence, Mohyla School of Journalism, National University „Kyiv-Mohyla Academy“, Kyiv, Ukraine
Lectures and Publications
Books:
Lokot, T. (2021). Beyond the Protest Square: Digital Media and Augmented Dissent. Lantham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield International.
Peer-reviewed articles (selected):
Wijermars, M., Lokot, T. (2022). Is Telegram a “harbinger of freedom”? The performance, practices, and perception of platforms as political actors in authoritarian states. Post-Soviet Affairs 38(1-2), 125-145. https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2022.2030645.
Lokot, T., Boichak, O. (2022). Translating Protest: Networked Diasporas and Transnational Mobilisation in Ukraine’s Euromaidan Protests. Partecipazione e Conflitto 15(1), 2022 Special issue “Bridging Social Movement Studies between Global North and South”, 203-222. DOI: 10.1285/i20356609v15i1p203.
Lokot, T. (2021). Ukraine is Europe? Complicating the concept of the ‘European’ in the wake of an urban protest. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 18(4), 439-446. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2021.1995619.
Lokot, T. (2020). Articulating Networked Citizenship on the Russian Internet: A Case for Competing Affordances. Social Media+ Society, 6(4), 2056305120984459.
Lokot, T. (2020). Data Subjects vs. People’s Data: Competing Discourses of Privacy and Power in Modern Russia. Media and Communication, 8(2), 314-322.
Freelon, D., Lokot, T. (2020). Russian Twitter disinformation campaigns reach across the American political spectrum. The Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review. https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-003.
Lokot, T. (2019). Urban Media Studies| The Augmented City in Protest: The Urban Media Studies Perspective. International Journal Of Communication, 13, 5333-5350.
Lokot, T. (2018). Be Safe or Be Seen? How Russian Activists Negotiate Visibility and Security in Online Resistance Practices. Surveillance & Society, 16(3), 332-346.
Lokot, T. (2018). #IAmNotAfraidToSayIt: Stories of Sexual Violence as Everyday Political Speech on Facebook. Information, Communication and Society, 21(6), 802-817.
Lokot, T. (2017). Public Networked Discourses in the Ukraine-Russia Conflict: ‘Patriotic Hackers’ and Digital Populism. Irish Studies in International Affairs, 2017, 99-116.
Book chapters (selected):
Gehlbach, S., Lokot, T., Shirikov, A. (2022, forthcoming). “The Russian media.” In (Wengle, S, ed.), Russian Politics Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,.
Lokot, T. (2022). “Social Media and Protest: Contextualising the Affordances of Networked Publics.” In (E. Celeste, C. Iglesias-Keller, A. Heldt eds.,) Constitutionalising Social Media. London: Hartt Publishing/Bloomsbury.
O’Brien, S., Cadwell, P., Lokot, T. (2022). “Parallel Pandemic Spaces: Translation, Trust and Social Media.” In (Tong King Lee, Dingkun Wang eds.), Translation and social media communication in the age of the pandemic. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003183907.
Porshnev, A., Miltsov, A., Lokot, T., & Koltsova, O. (2021, July). Effects of conspiracy thinking style, framing and political interest on accuracy of fake news recognition by social media users: evidence from Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, 341-357. Springer, Cham.
Lokot, T. (2021). The Future of Visibility: Imagining Possibilities for Networked Civic Discontent. In Sidorenko, A., & Asmolov, G. (eds). Horizon Scanning: The Role of Information Technologies in the Future of Civil Society. Moscow, Russia: Cogito-Centr, 194-213. https://hs.te-st.ru/
Lokot, T. (2019) Affective Resistance Against Online Misogyny and Homophobia on the RuNet. In Ging, D., & Siapera, E. (Eds.), Gender Hate Online: Understanding the New Anti-Feminism, 213-232, Cham: Palgrave MacMillan.
Lokot, T. (2019). Mediated Urban Protest: Practicing Dissent in Hybrid City Spaces. In Krajina, Z., & Stevenson, D. (Eds.), The Routledge Urban Media and Communication Companion, 416-424. London: Routledge.
Presentations and keynote lectures (selected):
Lokot, T. (2022). Keynote lecture “Building a Resilient Internet in the Shadow of Networked Authoritarianism”, Internet, Policy and Politics 2022 Conference, University of Sydney, September 28-29, 2022.
Lokot, T. (2022). Invited speaker, International Online Conference “Legal and Ethical Grounds for the Responsibility of Russian Propagandists for Spreading Disinformation, Hatred, and War Propaganda”, Ukrainian Media and Communication Institute (Ukraine), 2 November, 2022.
West, C., Lokot, T. (2022). Ireland’s Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill: Is it really meant to empower users?. 2022 Association of Internet Researchers annual conference, Dublin, Ireland, 2-5 November, 2022.
