Research

My research examines how news and online public expression shape the legitimacy of citizen participation in public life across authoritarian and democratic contexts.

I explore this question across four connected sites of inquiry: journalistic practice, mediated protest, vernacular digital expression, and taxpayer discourse. Across these areas, I ask who gets to speak, whose position is recognized, and how the authority to participate in public meaning-making is represented, justified and challenged in mediated information environments.

Methodologically, I draw on qualitative and quantitative approaches, including textual analysis, content analysis, experiments, computer-assisted analysis, interviews, and focus groups.

Journalism studies

These works examine how journalism shapes the contours of public life by claiming the authority to represent the public, respond to public critique, and navigate political, economic, and regional pressures.

Kananovich, V. (2025). Opportunities missed: The untapped potential in local US newspapers’ appeals for financial support. Journalism, Online first.
Kananovich, V. (2025). From authoritarianism to freedom and back again: Belarusian news media landscape. In A. Kazharski (Ed.), Handbook of Contemporary Belarus (pp. 144–156). Routledge.
Ficara, G., Smith, G., Hackett, E., Tavares, T., Hwang, J., Jochims, A., Crawford, M., Kananovich, V. and Perreault, G. (2025). Appalachia Strong: Joy in reporting Appalachian recovery from Hurricane Helene. Journalism Practice, 1–22.
Perreault, G., Kananovich, V., & Hackett, E. (2023). Guarding the firewall: How political journalists distance themselves from the editorial endorsement process. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 100(2), 354–372.
Kananovich, V. & Perreault, G. (2021). Audience as journalistic boundary worker: The rhetorical use of comments to critique media practice, assert legitimacy and claim authority. Journalism Studies, 22(3), 322–341.
Kananovich, V. & Young, R. (2019). Too hard to shout over the loudest frame: Effects of competing frames in the context of the crystallized media coverage on offshore outsourcing. Atlantic Journal of Communication, 27(2), 99–113.

Vernacular digital expression

These works explore how people use everyday forms of digital public expression to make sense of power, media, and social life.

Kananovich, V. (2025). Online memes on anti-American propaganda and the overlooked “silent majority” in support of authoritarian populism in Putin’s Russia. New Media & Society, 27(3), 1256–1278.
Kananovich, V. (2025). Editing rules will be memed: Using memes to support writing practice in journalism courses. Teaching Journalism & Mass Communication, 15(2), 73–76.
Young, R., Kananovich, V., & Johnson, B. G. (2023). Young adults’ folk theories of how social media harms its users. Mass Communication and Society, 26(1), 23–46.
Kananovich, V. (2022). #presidentspartingwords at a critical juncture: Reclaiming the autonomous subject in social media discourse on coronavirus in Belarus. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 46(3), 244–267.

Mediated protest

These works examine how political disruption is granted or stripped of legitimacy across different media and legal contexts, asking how states, media, and publics distinguish protest as valid political expression from protest as deviance or threat.

Kananovich, V. (2026). From “angry mobs” to “citizens in anguish”: The malleability of the protest paradigm in the international news coverage of the 2021 US Capitol attack. American Behavioral Scientist, 70(2), 208–233.
Kananovich, V. (2023). Beyond the “Telegram revolution”: Understanding the role of social media in reshaping the social contract in Belarus. Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, 22, 143–149.
Kananovich, V. & Durham, F. D. (2018). Reproducing the imprint of power: Framing the “creative class” in Putin’s Russia. International Journal of Communication, 12, 1087–1113.
Kananovich, V. (2016). Progressive artists, political martyrs, or blasphemous hussies? A content analysis of the Russian media coverage of the Pussy Riot affair. Popular Music and Society, 39(4), 396–409.
Kananovich, V. (2015). “Execute not pardon”: The Pussy Riot case, political speech, and blasphemy in Russian law. Communication Law and Policy, 20(4), 343–422.
Kananovich, V. (2014). Pussy Riot vs. civil obedience: A critical discourse analysis of two texts. Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 16, 65–81.

Taxpayer discourse

These works explore how taxpayer discourse constructs citizens’ relationship to the state and shapes expectations of political accountability across democratic and authoritarian contexts.

Kananovich, V. (2024). Subordinate or entitled partner? The effects of taxpayer news on political trust and demands for government accountability. Western Journal of Communication, 88(1), 170–193.
Kananovich, V. (2022). Contract partner with no rights: The construction of the taxpayer subject in the Belarusian government press. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 19(4), 325–343.
Kananovich, V. (2018). Framing the taxation-democratization link: An automated content analysis of cross-national newspaper data. International Journal of Press/Politics, 23(2), 247–267.