Deepening our collaboration with the University of Toronto in disinformation research, Vera Tolz will be involved in the realization of the project “Beyond Disinformation: The Strategic Techniques and Transnational Contours of Evolving Narrative and Diasporic Information Orders.” The project is funded jointly through the Knowledge Synthesis grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and UK Research and Innovation’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (UKRI-AHRC). It is headed by Kenzie Burchell (University of Toronto) and Vera Tolz (University of Manchester).
The project will support the development of the Manchester, Melbourne, and Toronto (MMT) research cluster. It aims to fund RAships for Manchester and Toronto-based graduate students over the next 6-9 months to work with our MMT faculty collaborators through the lens of "Evolving Narratives of Cultures and History" and survey the field roughly in terms of four domains:
1. Evolving narratives of diaspora identity, communities, and culture
2. Interventions of commercial digital platforms and authoritarian digital governance techniques
3. Transnational networks of state-aligned and non-state actors
4. Best practices assessment of stakeholder engagement and public communication of research.