DoctorDaria Kuznetsova

Kia ora! I am a Lecturer in the School of Languages, Social and Political Sciences at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand and hold a dual appointment between Political Science and International Relations department and Media and Communication department. My main research focuses on how political actors in authoritarian regimes use digital communication spaces to control, exploit, and manipulate information creation, dissemination, and consumption. In my dissertation, I investigated the effects of digital media, particularly the messaging app Telegram, on the protests in Belarus in 2020 and the 2022 anti-war protests in Russia. I use computational (text analysis and network analysis) and conventional econometric methods.

I am a part of the University of Canterbury team in the Ukraine Heritage Project co-funded by the EU within the ERASMUS+ Jean Monnet Policy Debate action. As a member of the Strategic Communication of Ukraine’s Heritage research group, I oversee data collection and develop a methodology for computational analysis of strategic communication data.