Jane Pyo

Jane Yeahin Pyo is an assistant professor in Tulane’s Department of Communication. Her interdisciplinary research draws on media studies, critical technology studies, global studies, and journalism studies. She brings critical and global perspectives to how digital media technology impacts and shapes our democratic and social life. In particular, her research area includes digital politics, global digital platforms, and democracy.

Her book project, Who is the Parasite? Digital Attacks and New Modes of Digital Politics in South Korea, examines how digital platforms reshape civic politics and news organizations, changing how we define and understand democratic practices and institutions. She explores the emergence of a new mode of politics within South Korean left-wing activism that utilizes online harassment as a tactic to challenge the longstanding power of the conservative press in the gatekeeping of civic discourses since the authoritarian dictatorship. Exploring how news organizations, as a core democratic institution, are impacted by digital platforms, her book reveals divergent ways that people imagine and practice democracy in digital, global contexts.

Before joining Tulane, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and an inaugural postdoctoral fellow of the Global Technology for Social Justice Lab (GloTech). Working with Jonathan Corpus Ong and Ethan Zuckerman, she examined how racialized disinformation poses threats to democracy, particularly looking at Asian American communities. Drawing on this, her research will explore how global digital platforms, cultural identities and membership, and transnational information flows intersect.

She has published in leading journals, including New Media & Society, Digital Journalism, and the International Journal of Communication.