Dr Precious Chatterje-Doody is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at The Open University, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a member of the UK Young Academy. Her research is focused on the interrelationship between communication, perception, identity, and security, with a particular focus on Russia, disinformation, and military aggression. Her new co-authored book, Russia, Disinformation and the Liberal Order: RT as populist pariah (Cornell University Press, 2024) is now available in Open Access.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

For me, the most exciting IR work is always happening at the intersection of IR with other disciplines. It is a remarkably adaptable and elastic discipline, and I think this is a good thing. One of the most crucial areas of enquiry in international relations at the moment relates to how human beings and other political actors function within a globally integrated real-time media environment. Our daily routines, perceptions, and understandings are increasingly shaped by relatively opaque algorithmic factors that can then go on to influence our feelings and behaviours. What impact does this new reality have on debates about structure and agency? How can we separate the decisions we make about how we use online platforms from the platform-based structures and the shaping we experience through them? How do our online engagements intersect with our offline behaviours and decisions? What is the political economy of these dynamics? These are just a few examples of the kind of questions we need multidisciplinary engagement to make sense of in contemporary international relations.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

I consider myself a bit of an intellectual magpie, and I am very lucky to have picked up some fantastic inspiration from the wide range of very interesting and knowledgeable co-authors I have worked with across various disciplines. For me, the robust back-and-forth of co-authorship is a particularly good way to incorporate ideas and perspectives that you might not find intuitive, but that can significantly enrich your scholarship. I believe that, in most cases, if IR scholarship is not speaking across disciplines, it is probably missing a big part of the picture.

How would you define ‘geopolitical culture jamming,’ and how does it differ from other satirical or culture-jamming approaches?

Geopolitical culture jamming is a tactic used by non-Western state-funded international broadcasters to critique and subvert the culture of the state they are addressing, but using that state’s very own culture. It goes beyond pure satire because it involves deliberately blurring the line between news and comedy. It is also different from culture jamming, which emerged........

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