Mehmet Ozan Aşık, Ph.D.

I am a Lecturer in the Institute of Sociological Studies ​at Charles University, Prague. My interdisciplinary research spans digital sociology, media and politics, and ethnography, with an expertise on the Middle East, specifically Turkey. I hold an MA in Middle East Studies and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge. My doctoral research, based on newsroom ethnography in television channels, advanced a bottom-up approach to understanding how mainstream journalists interpret their professional roles in relation to their political worldviews within polarized socio-cultural contexts.

More recently, my work has focused on digital media, particularly journalism, news consumption, and information practices on social media. I have completed two major projects in this area. The first examined transformations in journalistic practice on YouTube within Turkey's authoritarian media environment, contributing to research on the platformization of journalism and strengthening my expertise in the digital media industry. The second project involved leading and training a team of ethnographers in long-term fieldwork to investigate how social media users engage with false information in Turkey's information ecosystem. Funded by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, this research explored users' news consumption patterns and information practices on social media.

Building on this agenda, I recently received a grant to study AI, TikTok's recommendation algorithms, and users' engagement with climate-related content. Expanding my research in digital media, I am currently interested in how digital technologies reshape the reproduction of social life, including gender relations, work and labor, consumption, smart urbanism and mobility, and the cultural industries.

To see my publications, check my CV on the webpage.

MA courses:

• Digital Ethnography
• Sociology of Digital Technology
• Text, Narrative and Discourse Analysis

• 2025 - Research Grant. Principal investigator. “A Sociological Perspective on Algorithms: TikTok Users' Information Practices Regarding the Climate Crisis.” Project no. SYL-2025-2528. Bursa Uludag University ($1,500).
• 2024 - Research Grant. Principal investigator. "Turkish journalistic YouTubers and the transformation of their economic, cultural, social and symbolic capitals from a Bourdieusian perspective." Project no. SHIZ-2024-1831. Bursa Uludag University ($1,000).
• 2022 - Research Grant. Co-investigator. "False Information in Turkey from the Perspective of Media Users and Resilience to False Information." The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) ($40,000).
• 2017 - Conference and Workshop Grant. Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, USA. Co-organizer of the workshop on "Anthropology of Media in Turkey: Theory, Methodology, and Future Orientations." Grant Number: CONF-747 ($20,000).

Media Sociology (Journalism, the Media Industry, Social Media and News Consumption); Sociology of Digital Technology, Information Practices and AI; Ethnography; Gender; Cultural Sociology