Research

My research examines how journalistic practices and digital media technologies shape citizen agency across democratic and authoritarian contexts.

My research agenda is organized around three interrelated lines of inquiry:

how platforms and AI systems are reshaping the negotiation of truth and of what counts as legitimate knowledge;
how digital affordances enable—and constrain—citizen participation; and
how journalistic practices and news discourse can mobilize or suppress civic agency.

Across this work, I ask who gets to speak and how the authority to participate in public meaning-making is granted, (re)claimed, and challenged in mediated environments.

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

Digital platforms, epistemic authority, and contested truth

In this line of research, I examine how audiences theorize about the effects of digital platforms, navigate platform-governance dilemmas involving institutional “arbiters of truth,” push back against competing accounts of reality and advance their own epistemic claims, and interact with conversational AI as an increasingly influential participant in the production of knowledge.

The studies below capture the published work in this area to date, with several related projects forthcoming or underway.

Kananovich, V. (2026). Audience as epistemic agent: Negotiating truth through online memes in Russia’s war in Ukraine. Mass Communication & Society. Online first.
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. & 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.

Civic agency and mediated protest

These works examine how civic agency and political disruption are granted or stripped of legitimacy, asking how news media and participatory digital technologies enable—and at times constrain—citizen agency across different political and media contexts.

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. (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.
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.

Constructing civic agency through mediated taxpayer discourse

This line of research explores how taxpayer discourse activates civic agency by positioning citizens in relation to the state and shaping their expectations of government 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.

Journalism, public participation, and authority

This work examines how journalism structures opportunities for public participation while negotiating its own institutional authority to narrate public life. I have studied how audiences scrutinize and contest journalistic practices, how local news organizations frame financial support for journalism as civic participation, and how journalism incorporates citizens’ epistemic labor in grassroots open-source investigations.

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.