This is a past event.

Join us Friday, April 14 at 1pm in the Petersen library for a presentation by assistant professor Rich Canevez on his research, "The Ukrainian Cyber Resistance: Tactics, Activism, and the State Reconsidered"

Abstract:

When Russia escalated its aggressions towards Ukraine in February 2022, pro-Ukrainian actors from around the world took to anonymous social media platform Telegram to resist this violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty. Organizing on Telegram symbolizes an evolution in the level of coordination and engagement that actors can adopt in armed political conflict, illustrating the increasingly participatory nature of war as amplified by broad access to information and cyber spaces as sites of conflict. I am working today on charting the space of “hybridized” war that combines conventional and unconventional (e.g. the information and cyber aspects) as practiced by the pro-Ukrainian resistance. I will present this ongoing research that depicts the tactics developed in information and cyber spaces that are constructed alongside and within the material realities of conventional warfare, as well as the structural nature of the resistance via social network analysis. I will also touch on the technical methods necessary for this work, including using Python to enable a range of analyses from raw Telegram data.