Emma Mateo

Emma Mateo is a sociologist who studies protest and activism in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Her research focuses on local mobilzation during mass protests and significant political events. Emma also studies how media and technology interact with protest and civil society mobilization, and her work makes innovative use of social media data, such as Telegram Messenger.

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At the Harriman Institute, Emma is working on a project examining grassroots community responses to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Despite massive amounts of aid being directed to international organizations and charities in response to Russia’s invasion, early studies have shown that it was in fact Ukrainian community groups and local NGOs that provided the overwhelming majority of humanitarian support in Ukraine in the initial months. This project will study how these local networks mobilize, and what tools they use to obtain and distribute resources to support humanitarian causes and the military in Ukraine. 

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Emma holds a DPhil (PhD) in Sociology from the University of Oxford, awarded in 2022. Emma’s doctoral thesis explores what shapes subnational variation in protest during nationwide instances of mass mobilization, in the cases of Ukraine (2013-14) and Belarus (2020). This article-based thesis studied in particular the role that different kinds of social networks (activist networks, community networks, workplace networks, and local political networks) play in shaping where protest and repression take place throughout a country. Emma’s research on the role of pre-existing networks during regional protests in Belarus is published in Post Soviet Affairs, and her co-authored article on media consumption, disinformation, and protest
participation during the Euromaidan protests (with Olga Onuch and Julian Waller) is published in Social Media + Society.