About

Dr Julia Rone has spent the last decade doing research on politics and the utopias and dystopias of digital media. Before joining CRASSH, she was a Wiener-Anspach postdoctoral researcher for the project “Conflicts of Sovereignty in a European Union in crisis” at the Université libre de Bruxelles and the University of Cambridge. She focused in particular on sovereignty conflicts around Brexit and free trade agreements such as CETA and TTIP. Julia holds a PhD in social and political science from the European University Institute in Florence and an MSc degree from the Oxford Internet Institute, which she pursued thanks to a Dulverton scholarship. She has taught at the University of Sofia, the University of Florence and the University of Dusseldorf, and since 2019 has also been supervising BA students in Cambridge.

Research

Some of the main topics Julia has explored in her research are hacktivism, social movements against free trade and austerity, disinformation, and more recently, the rise of far-right media in Europe. Her project at the Minderoo Centre for  Technology and Democracy aims to address the disinformation phenomenon from a critical political science perspective, focusing on how transnational networks, funding patterns and national media models influence the spread of disinformation on politics, technology, and climate change. Furthermore, Julia would like to explore ways of making regulation more democratic and participative, going beyond both the multi-stakeholder or authoritarian approaches to regulation that predominate currently. More specifically, she wants to find an answer to the question: can “digital sovereignty” be conceived as a democratic project to be negotiated by the people for the people?

Selected Publications

Books and monographs:

  • Contesting Austerity and Free Trade in the EU: Protest Diffusion in Complex Media Arenas, Routledge, 2020.

Peer-Reviewed Articles and Chapters in Edited Volumes

  • The return of the state? Power and Legitimacy Challenges to EU’s regulation of online disinformation, In: Contested Power and Authority in Internet Governance: Return of the State?, edited by Blayne Haggart, Natasha Tusikov, Jan Aart Scholte. Routledge Global Cooperation Series, (in press).
  • Hacking and Hacktivism, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Citizen Media, edited by Luis Pérez-González, Bolette Blaagaard and Mona Baker. London: Routledge, 2020.
  • Democracy in the era of social media: Why the Deus Ex Machina will not Work this time?, in Europe in the Brave New World Transform Europe 2020 Yearbook, 2020.
  • Dzuverovic, Nemanja, Julia Rone and Tom Junes, Introduction: Contentious Politics and International Statebuilding, Special Issue of East European Politics and Societies, 2020.
  • Fake profiles, trolls, and digital paranoia: Digital media practices in breaking the Indignados Movement, Social Movement Studies, 2019.
  • Slipping Through the Net: The Politics of Internet Metaphors, In From Linguistics to Semiotics: Trajectories and Perspectives in Communication Research, Sofia University Press, 2019.
  • Contested international agreements, contested national politics: How the radical left and the radical right opposed TTIP in four European countries, London Review of International Law, 2019.
  • The People Formerly Known as the Oligarchy: The Cooptation of Citizen Journalism, in Citizen Media and Public Spaces, edited by Mona Baker and Bolette Blaagaard. London: Routledge, 2016.
  • Bulgarian Pirates: At the World’s End, Cultural Trends, 22 (2013), 2-13.
  • Culture Wide Closed: Pirate Monopolies, Forum Dictatorship and Nationalism in the Practice of File Sharing, in Cultures and Ethics of Sharing. Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press, 2012.

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