Olga Lazitski

PhD Candidate, University of California, San Diego

Olga Lazitski is a media scholar and a journalist. Her academic work encompasses issues of propaganda and populism within the contexts of the post-truth era, production of national subjects and nationalist sentiments, public resistance to the hegemonic discourses and oppressive regimes, practices of alternative professional journalism and its role in the public spheres.

Olga’s broad scholarly interest relates to the concept of media endarkenment – the term she coined attempting to name the processes of media influence and practices of media production and media consumption, by which the number of informed, critical-thinking and active citizens decreases.

Currently Olga is a PhD candidate at UCSD Communication department. She is teaching courses on media production, propaganda and persuasion and media systems within different political regimes.

Olga has been working as a reporter, producer, anchor, and news writer for the Russian national networks in Moscow and the local broadcasting companies in Siberia and the Russia’s Far East. While living in Russia, she also worked as a contributor for CNN.

Olga has been a Fulbright scholar in Emerson College in Boston where she started her media research on media endarkenment, propaganda, and persuasion. In her research, Olga uses comparative approach to study social issues within different national, cultural and political contexts, comparing contemporary Russian and U.S. nationalist sentiments, populist styles of Trump and Putin, propaganda techniques of the U.S. partisan media outlets and the Russian national broadcasting networks. In her most recent project, Olga studies alternative professional journalism. She proposed this term to describe a community of Russian journalists that challenge the state’s propaganda efforts and provide the Russian public with the counter-narrative to the official discourse.