The Information War: communication and the Russian invasion of Ukraine
ECREA webinar

Recorded on Wednesday 9 March 2022

Link to the recording: https://youtu.be/56mpn4iUE34

Speakers:

Precious Chatterje-Doody (The Open University)
Tanya Lokot (Dublin City University)
Lyubov Naydonova (Institute for social and political psychology of National Academy of Educational Science of Ukraine)
Elisabeth Schimpfoessl (Aston University)
Joanna Szostek (University of Glasgow)

Moderated by ECREA President, John Downey (Loughborough University)

Precious Chatterje-Doody

Dr Precious Chatterje-Doody is a Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at the Open University. She taught previously at the Universities of Manchester and Birmingham, and worked for two years as a Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project Reframing Russia for the Global Mediasphere: from Cold War to 'Information War'?

Her research interests centre on questions of communication, perception and security, with a particular focus on Russia. Her work engages with the role of historical memory and identity in international relations; soft power, political communication and global media (particularly Russia's international broadcaster, RT); and critical approaches to security, including emotions and war.

Tanya Lokot

Tanya (Tetyana) Lokot is Associate Professor in Digital Media and Society at the School of Communications, Dublin City University. She researches threats to digital rights, networked authoritarianism, 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 and Russia.

Tanya has worked as a journalist, non-profit consultant, and media trainer in Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia, and speaks fluent English, Russian, and Ukrainian. From 2014 to 2016 she was contributing editor for the RuNet Echo project at Global Voices. Previously, she was Assistant Professor and Head of New Media Sequence at Mohyla School of Journalism (NaUKMA, Kyiv, Ukraine). Tanya received her PhD from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. Among other things, she chairs the ECREA Media, Cities and Space Section.

Lyubov Naydonova

Lyubov is a deputy director for research at the Institute for social and political psychology of National Academy of Educational Science of Ukraine (in Kyiv), Member of Public Council of National broadcasting regulator, President of Ukrainian association of media psychologists and media educators, doctor of psychology and ECREA member.

Elisabeth Schimpfoessl

Elisabeth Schimpfoessl is a senior lecturer at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Aston University Birmingham. In recent years she has focused on two research topics. First is research into the sociology of elites, power and social inequality, and, second, comparative research into media and journalism in post-communist Europe.

Her book Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie (Oxford University Press 2018) looks at the top 0.1 percent in Putin's Russia. In a follow-up project, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, Elisabeth compared the practices of British and Russian philanthropists. The second strand of her research deals with post-communist journalism, which she carries out together with Ilya Yablokov from the University of Leeds. This research started in Russia and then expanded to Eastern Europe.

Joanna Szostek

Joanna Szostek is a lecturer in Political Communication at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests centre on the role of mass media in relations between states, particularly in the post-Soviet region. Before moving to Glasgow she completed a three-year research project to investigate and explain the reception of competing political narratives among audiences in Ukraine. The project was funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship from the European Commission. It included an 18-month secondment to Kyiv Mohyla Academy in Ukraine and a five-month secondment to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Results from that project are published in leading international journals, including Perspectives on Politics and The International Journal of Press/Politics.

From 2019 Joanna works on a new research project investigating why levels of engagement with local, national and foreign/transnational media vary within and across ‘peripheral’ regions of Ukraine. The project, which is funded by the British Academy, is intended to shed light on how media use among ‘peripheral’ audiences can undermine and/or benefit state security, broadly defined. She holds a doctorate in Politics from the University of Oxford. Her professional experience includes several years at the BBC and many years of living and working in Russia and Ukraine. She is currently an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, The Royal Institute of International Affairs.