I have two years of independent teaching experience at Syracuse University, in addition to having facilitated two international academic summer programmes on Syracuse campus. I have taught both graduate and undergraduate courses, and supervised graduate and undergraduate students on a number of research projects, as well as in class. Out of the four courses I have taught at Syracuse University, I have actively contributed to developing lectures and course materials for three of them, and this year I have been invited by the Sociology Department to design and teach my own Internet & Society course to meet a growing need in theoretical courses that address social and cultural transformations of the digital age. I am highly motivated to develop curriculum that explores various domains of social transformation brought about by digital technologies, whether through theory (drawing from a range of critical and postcolonial perspectives on digitalization and datafication, studying affect in mediatized environments, or bridging social movements literature with media studies), or through method (intersecting ethnographic and computational approaches to social inquiry). Having developed a novel analytic approach to identify patterns of orchestrated behavior across election campaigns, I would be interested to offer a research design course on digital methods. Alternatively, I would be delighted to develop a class on digital activism, which would involve data visualization and social network analysis techniques.
Supervising undergraduate and graduate research students
I have supervised undergraduate and graduate research students on a number of projects. In Summer 2017, I was a facilitator at the Fulbright Pre-Academic orientation, where I supervised individual research projects for 15 master’s and doctoral-level international students to prepare them for starting graduate programs in the United States. Coming from a multicultural background, I appreciated an opportunity to tap into my experience to better prepare my students for entering the U.S. academia. Many of the students’ research projects that we developed at the Pre-Academic orientation laid the groundwork for their master’s and doctoral theses. In addition to my Fulbright experience, I was a program facilitator for the Transnational NGO Leadership Institute, hosted annually by the Moynihan Institute for Global Affairs. We had a large, diverse cohort of mid-level leadership from the non-profit sector worldwide, and our two-week training program was a success according to the participants’ feedback.
Over the past two years, I was a research assistant on TRACE, led by Dr. Jennifer Stromer-Galley and funded by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (U.S.). The project was a large multi-disciplinary collaboration among three leading research universities in the U.S. to build a web-based intelligence analysis tool. I led a team on analytical case development, which included supervising a group of doctoral students on analytic material creation and running pilot experiments to test performance among our target demographics. In 2017, I also supervised a team of undergraduate students on a project called Illuminating, led by Dr. Jennifer Stromer-Galley. Prior to beginning my doctorate studies, I supervised a team of 10 field researchers who collected and analyzed survey data for political polls. These experiences speak to my ability to effectively supervise undergraduate and graduate research students and guide them through the completion of their theses and research projects.
Teaching Innovation and Creative Digital Industries
In 2017, I co-organized THATCamp at Syracuse University – an unconference aimed to showcase innovative ideas and tools at the intersection of humanities and technology. Sessions atTHATCampincluded talks, hackathons, writeathons, makerspaces, tech skills workshops and experiments, and were open to Syracuse students and Central New York public with diverse backgrounds and epistemological perspectives on technology. In 2018, I presented a contemporary art project at Theorizing the Web (Museum of the Moving Image, Queens, NY), in which I collaborated with renowned Ukrainian artists Daria Marchenko and Daniel Green on a performance called “Mediatizing War: Digital Media and the Battlefronts”. We used assemblages as an art form to theorize on the role of media and mediatization in a contemporary military conflict. Finally, as President of the Ukrainian Club of Syracuse University, I am currently in the process of organizing an art exhibition, 50 Ukrainian inventions bestowed by Ukraine to the world, to celebrate the unique contribution of Ukrainian thinkers to the global academic community. This exhibition will incorporate various forms of digital media, including an immersive virtual documentary called Aftermath VR that chronicles the violent events of the Euromaidan revolution in Kyiv, Ukraine from early 2014.