Josephine | Modern Kilogirl

Josephine ("Jo") Lukito is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media (in the Moody College of Communication).

Jo’s research specializes in malicious political language in the public sphere, focusing on cross-platform flows of messages and frames about global economic and political issues. Methodologically, Jo specializes in computational and quantitative methods analyzing mass communicated text, including corpus and computational linguistics, natural language processing, human and automated content analysis, and text-as-data strategies. She holds Ph.D minors in English Language & Linguistics and Political Science (methodology & IR).

Jo’s past studies have analyzed linguistic intergroup biases in U.S. news reporting of the Global South, differences in news about 20th century and 21st century social movements, temporal changes in social media conversations about the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, and the impact of Russian disinformation in the U.S. communication ecology. She has discussed her research on Russian disinformation in the Columbia Journalism Review and on CNN; this work was also referenced in Robert Mueller’s 2018 report (p. 27). Her dissertation focused on news coverage and public opinion about U.S.-China trade, revealing how misinformation can emerge from national news coverage of the China Shock.

Her ongoing work focuses on the multi-platform spread of misinformation, disinformation, and unverified conspiracy theories in democracies, including the amplification of such messages (sometimes unintentionally) by news media and political actors.

A first-generation undergraduate and graduate student, Jo earned her B.A. in Political Science and Communication at the State University of New York, Geneseo, where she published her first paper. She earned her M.A. in Media Studies at the Newhouse School of Public Communications in Syracuse University. A version of her thesis, "Linguistic Abstractness as a Discursive Microframe: LCM Framing in International Reporting by American News Media," received the second top student paper award at the 2015 Association in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) conference. 

Jo earned her Ph.D in Mass Communication from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Summer of 2020. Jo earned her Master’s in Media Studies from Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and her B.A. in Communication and Political Science from SUNY Geneseo.

“Language can only be understood in the context of communication.”

— Newmeyer, 1999