ABOUT
Olga Boichak is a sociologist of digital media and culture and lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney, Australia. She holds a Master of Public Administration and a PhD in Social Science from Syracuse University (USA), and her research interests span networks, narratives, and cultures of activism in the digital age. Before joining the University of Sydney in 2019, Olga was a visiting scholar at Ryerson University (Canada) and a research assistant at the Center for Computational and Data Sciences (Syracuse University), where she contributed to the development of tools and analytic techniques that support information evaluation, social listening, and decision-making in complex scenarios. Prior to becoming an academic, she managed political campaigns in Ukraine and ran the Centre for Public Opinion Research (2005-2015), as well as served as Ukraine’s youth delegate to the United Nations (2014).
Boichak has a track record of publications on digital war, legitimising state power, transnational mobilisation, and algorithmic surveillance. She is an editor of the Digital War journal and is currently working on a project that explores diasporic humanitarianism and remote participation in homeland conflicts. Her work has appeared, among others, in Big Data & Society, International Journal of Communication, Media, War & Conflict, Intelligence and National Security, and the Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Digital Media. She is the recipient of several international fellowships and awards, including the Young Generation Will Change Ukraine (2013), Fulbright Fellowship (2014), International Communication Association’s Top Paper Award (2019), and the Higher Education Academy Fellowship (2021).
