Lavinia Pascu

Lavinia-Marina Pascu is a PhD researcher in Politics at the University of East Anglia. Her research sits at the intersection of digital political communication, religion, politics, and diaspora studies. She examines how Christianity is digitally instrumentalised within contemporary Romanian populist discourse, with a particular focus on transnational communication targeting the Romanian diaspora in the United Kingdom. Her work explores how religious narratives, symbols, and moral claims are constructed and circulated on digital platforms, and how diaspora audiences interpret and negotiate these hybrid religious-political messages.

Her research is theoretically informed by scholarship on populism, political communication, digital media, and diaspora politics, and methodologically combines qualitative discourse and semiotic analysis with digital methods and interviews. She is particularly interested in questions of political ethics, platform power, affective mobilisation, and the role of digital media in shaping moral and political authority.

Prior to her doctoral studies, Lavinia completed an MSc in Digital Business and Management at Norwich Business School, University of East Anglia, following a BA in Digital Media and Communications at Middlesex University. She is currently a first-year PhD researcher in the School of Politics, Philosophy and Area Studies. Alongside her doctoral research, she is a Fellow on a selective Cambridge-based interdisciplinary programme focused on intellectual formation, ethics, and public engagement, and draws on prior professional experience in digital media and content production in her work on platform dynamics and political communication.