The Citizen Lab is excited to announce that Ksenia Ermoshina will be joining as the latest Open Technology Fund research fellow and will bring her expertise in technology, communications, and political sociology to explore information controls in Crimea, Ukraine.
Ksenia is a Russian-born researcher and Internet freedom activist. She holds a PhD in the socio-economy of innovation from Mines Paris Tech engineering school. Her research interests lie at the intersection of science and technology studies, Internet governance studies, usability of encryption, and privacy enhancing technologies. Her thesis focused on the civic tech movement in Russia and France and studied UX/UI design, development, and testing of civic mobile applications (such as apps for election monitoring and electoral fraud mapping, apps for reporting corruption, and apps for reporting police violence).
As an OTF research fellow at the Citizen Lab, Ksenia will investigate information controls in the region of Crimea after its annexation and information operations in the context of Russian-Ukrainian armed conflict. She will combine network measurements and ethnographic methodology (primarily interviews, non-participant observations, and web-ethnography). Her study will be focused on three levels: infrastructure, intermediaries (ISPs, hosting providers), and users (targeted threats to journalists and human rights activists and new tactics of circumvention and self-defence deployed in the region).