Visiting fellows

We attract scholars and industry leaders who work with us for short periods of time.

Visiting scholars can contribute to our research, our teaching, provide consulting and insight into the development of our degree programmes or further their own studies.

Current visiting fellows

Dr Syed Inam ur Rahman

Dr Syed Inam ur Rahman is a visiting scholar conducting his post doctorate research on Exploring Risks and Security Concerns Faced by Journalists on Pak-Afghan Border Areas and Adjoining Districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan.

He has also submitted a proposal for writing a book. The title of the proposed book is The Future of Journalism in Afghanistan.

Dr. Inam has an extensive publication record, focusing on topics such as international broadcasters’ role in formulation of public opinion, FM radio role in disasters and media role in development.

Dr. Inam is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Communication, International Islamic University Islamabad, Pakistan.

He can be contacted at InamS@cardiff.ac.uk; syed.inamrahman@iiu.edu.pk.

Maria Iranzo Cabrera

Maria is from the University of Valencia where she is currently an assistant professor in Journalism and Coordinater of undergraduate studies.

Since 2018 Maria has focused her research on journalistic self-regulation with a gender perspective. Specifically, she has analysed the different collectives of feminist journalists that have emerged in Spain as a result of the 8M demonstration in 2018, the figure of the gender editor that has been implemented in 10 Spanish media (https://links.uv.es/vgaV5bg) and the use of Twitter as a channel for regulation among colleagues in terms of gender equality in content (https://go.uv.es/bgt7MD3).

In parallel, as a professor of Multimedia Journalism, she has also analysed the uses of media literacy and democratic deliberation of platforms such as Twitch (https://links.uv.es/u3C1UYz), in which the politician Inigo Errejón - together with, for example, the French Melenchon-, have carried out a self-monitoring work (since it is the elected official himself who proactively exercises accountability to the citizenry without the intervention of a third party).

Maria is working with Cindy Carter to review the deontological obligations of the media that publish content on TikTok, bearing in mind that it is a network that can be accessed at the age of 13 and where the teenage audience is notable. Are the British and Spanish media, in particular the persons who are responsible for creating and editing these contents, carrying out media literacy among minors and younger citizens (particularly in electoral contexts such as the one we are currently experiencing, both in United Kingdom and in European Union)?

Dafne Calvo

Dafne has a PhD in Communication from the University of Valladolid, and is an Assistant Professor at the Universitat de València, Spain. With research stays in prestigious centers and a guest professorship in Mexico, she has contributed to national R&D projects with renowned universities like Complutense University of Madrid and University Carlos III of Madrid. Her research, funded by entities such as the Banco Sabadell Foundation, focuses on political participation, digital communication, and free culture. Currently, she collaborates with Prof. Emiliano Treré at the University of Cardiff on "Counter mapping COVID," exploring activist use of maps in Iberoamerica.

Saleem Akhtar PhD

Saleem Akhtar PhD, is a dedicated scholar in Media and Communication Studies at The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Pakistan. With a background as a senior lecturer at the University of Central Punjab Lahore, and experience in reputable media outlets, Saleem brings a wealth of expertise to his work. He is currently pursuing his doctoral fellowship funded by the Higher Education Commission, Government of Pakistan, under the guidance of Professor Stuart Allan. Saleem's research interests encompass Journalism & Communication, Media & Society, and Political Communication.

Sara Suárez-Gonzalo

Dr. Shabir Hussain

Dr Hussain’s ongoing research project investigates digital hate speech and disinformation within the political discourse of India and Pakistan. More precisely, the study scrutinizes the intricate connections between mediated populism, hate speech, and disinformation prevalent in both nations. Dr. Hussain has an extensive publication record, focusing on topics such as peace communication, the interplay of media and politics, media-driven advocacy for civil rights, and the problematic use of social media. Dr. Hussain is Professor of political communication at Bahria University in Islamabad, Pakistan. He can be contacted at shasain2@gmail.com.

Dr Ángel Barbas

Dr Ángel Barbas is a Lecturer in the Teoría de la Educación y Pedagogía Social department at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) in Madrid. He holds a PhD in Communication and Education. His main research topics are focused on the study of communication and education processes from the perspective of social pedagogy. He is particularly interested in the educational dimension of social movements, activist media practices and alternative media as media literacy agents. He has been visiting research fellow in the University of Texas at Austin, RMIT University of Melbourne and Loughborough University London. He also has been visiting professor in the Universidad Manuela Beltrán of Colombia and the Universidade de São Paulo of Brazil. His most recent paper has been published in the Social Movement Studies journal with Dr Emiliano Treré (Barbas & Treré, 2023).

Dr Beatriz Villarejo

Dr Beatriz Villarejo is a Maria Zambrano researcher (State Research Agency in Spain) and lecturer in Gabinete de Comunicación y Educacion (Communication and Education Gabinete) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and CREA - Community of Research on Excellence for All.  Currently, she is also an academic visitor at Cardiff University, thanks to the José Castillejo scholarship from the Spanish Ministry of Universities.

She has participated in 20 research projects, including research funded by the European Framework Programme H2020 and FP6 Sixth Framework Programme (2), Plan Nacional I+D+I (2), Erasmus + and other projects funded by the European Commission (10), among others. Thanks to the training in theory, methods, and research techniques acquired in the master's degree in journalism and communication, the degree in audiovisual communication, the diploma in social education and the experience accumulated in my research and teaching career, she has published 30 articles in scientific journals, 16 indexed articles which give me extensive experience in the field of research and its impact on society.

Clara Manthey

Clara Manthey studies science journalism at TU Dortmund (Germany). She is in her 7th semester and has a natural science focus in her studies. Besides her studies, she works as a student assistant for the department of Science Journalism at TU Dortmund University."

David Montero Sánchez

David Montero Sánchez is a lecturer at the Department of Journalism I (University of Seville, Spain). He specializes in the field of visual culture, non-fiction filmmaking and citizen participation. David’s current research focuses on video-activism and social movements, as well as on the use of participatory video in on-line environments to foster political engagement. He is the author of "Thinking Images. The Essay Film as a Dialogic Form in European Cinema" (Peter Lang, 2012). He has also co-edited the volumes "Videoactivismo y movimientos sociales" (GEDISA, 2015) with Dr. Francisco Sierra Caballero and "Del ciberactivismo a la tecnopolítica: movimientos sociales en la era del escepticismo tecnológico" (Comunicación Social, 2021) with Dr. Jose Candón-Mena. He has published articles in journals such as the “International Journal of Communication” and “Media, Culture and Society”, among others. David has previously taught at the University of Bath (UK).

Sara C. Santoriello

Sara is a PhD student in Social Sciences and Statistics at University of Naples "Federico II", working with the Political Science Chair on ethics of AI, identity and platforms. For three months she was a visiting researcher at Data Justice Lab.

Dr Lei Sun

Dr Sun is an Associate Professor from the School of Journalism & Communication, Xiamen University. She is a visiting academic at JOMEC under the Xiamen University and Cardiff University Partnership.

Dr Sun is a Dean of the Centre for Climate Change Communication and Science Education. Her current research fields are related to intercultural understanding of climate change communication, risk and health perceptions and media effect of environmental issues.

Before coming to JOMEC, Dr Sun was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Climate Change Communication, George Mason University in U.SA and was working on a comparative study of climate change media frame effect in China and the U.S.A.

Dr Sun holds a PhD from Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her PhD research was focused on environmental literacy of pupils in China.

Hala Mulki

Hala is an independent scholar based in Ankara and is currently employed as Data Scientist at the ORSAM Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

She has a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Selcuk University, Fen Bilimler Institute, Konya in Turkey. Her PhD research was on ‘Sentiment Classification of Arabic Tweets using a Novel Learning of a Sentiment Specific Word Embeddings Technique’ and her specialization is in social media analysis for multilingual textual contents, underrepresented languages (Arabic, Turkish) and Arabic dialect.

Her current research interests include sentiment analysis and text visualisation; hate speech and abusive language detection; and natural language understanding and chatbots.

Hala has been a Cara Fellow during 2021, when she completed a research project on hate speech and disinformation against Syrians on Turkish twitter.

Eduardo González de la Fuente

Eduardo is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of East Asian Studies at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Eduardo has previously been a Japan Foundation Fellow at the University of the Ryukyus, and a Francisco Ayala Foundation Fellow; as well as a visiting scholar at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and El Colegio de México.

His research focuses mainly on the cultural history of karate, with research lines ranging from historical sociology to popular and visual cultures. As a result of his interest in karate, he developed a special fondness for Okinawan studies.

In 2021 he received the Best Doctoral Dissertation Award by the Spanish Association of East Asian Studies. He is also interested in early boxing literature.

Jofre Riba Morales

Jofre Riba has a degree in Sociology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a Master's in Sociology, Social Transformations and Innovation from the University of Barcelona. He is currently doing his doctoral thesis on the communication strategies of bullfighting activism.

Michele Avanzi

Michele Avanzi started his BA studies in Sociology at Università degli studi di Milano Biccocca. There, he graduated with honors with a thesis about how different city’s governments handle graffiti, and how their policies influence public space.He continued his studies at Università degli studi di Milano, and gained a Masters in Marketing and Communications.

Jingshan Liu

Jingshan Liu is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Media Research Programme at the Department of Communication, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain. She has been a lecturer in Oriental Cultural Studies and Chinese Linguistics at the Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile (2014-2016) and the Universidad Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain (2016-2018). Her research interests focus on Education and Communication, the critical studies of ICTs and EdTech (educational technologies), and the comparative study of media representations of educational technologies in different socio-cultural contexts. She is a member of the Spanish Association of Communication Research.

Dr Xiuling Zhu

Dr Xiuling Zhu is an associate professor of the School of Journalism and Communication, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, PR China.

Her research interests are focused around children and media, family communication. She is the author of two books including Research on Prevention and Guidance of Adolescent Online Risk from the Perspective of Family Communication (2021) and Adolescents’ Mobile Phones Use and Family Intergenerational Communication (2017) and has published articles in Chinese leading journals such as Journalism Bimonthly, Chinese Journal of Journalism & Communication, China Youth Study, etc. and is currently working on a project examining the incentive and cultivation mechanism of adolescents’ online prosocial behaviour in Digital Age.

Alex Aiken

Alex Aiken is an Executive Director for Government Communication. He focuses on security and international communication issues and leads the Cabinet Office communication team. He also oversees government campaigns on the Union and ‘Levelling Up’. He was appointed in December 2012 and was responsible for creating the Government Communication Service (GCS) and developing cross-government campaigns.

He served as GCS Head of Profession, responsible for government communication strategy, managing the combined Prime Minister’s Office and Cabinet Office communications team from 2012 to 2021.

Between 2000 and 2012 he was Director of Communications and Strategy for Westminster City Council, leading the policy, member services and communications teams. He was part of the group that oversaw the implementation of the Tri-Borough Shared Services programme and established the Westco communications consultancy which works for public and private sector clients around the UK. Prior to Westminster he worked in political communication.

He has been National Secretary of LG communications and Vice Chairman of the Public Relations Consultants Association Council. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) and Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA).

Rod Cartwright

Rod is the Principal of Rod Cartwright Consulting, a strategic communication consulting firm, established in late-2019, whose mission is to enhance human preparedness, organizational resilience and business performance.

Over a 25+ year PR career, he has held board-level positions at top-10 international agency networks Ketchum, Hill+Knowlton Strategies and GCI. He was a Partner and Global Corporate Practice Director at Ketchum, before becoming EMEA Regional Director at Text100 (now Archetype).

An internationally renowned crisis communication expert – with frontline crisis experience including Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 – Rod chairs the EACD’s Crisis & Risk Communication Expert Group and is Special Advisor to the CIPR’s Crisis Communication Network.

A former PRCA Board member and PA Committee Chair, he was Deputy Chair of the Association’s Global COVID-19 Communications Taskforce, a member of its Professional Practices Committee for the Bell Pottinger affair and sits on the Steering Committee of the PRCA/ICCO Ukraine Communications Support Network.

In 2020, he won the World Communication Forum's inaugural 'Silver Star Award’ at the Davos Communication Awards, recognizing a practitioner over the age of 50 who has made – and continues to make – significant contributions to public relations and communications practice.

David Hurn

David Hurn is an award-winning photographer and a member of the world-leading cooperative, Magnum Photos. With a reputation established by his photo-reportage during the Hungarian revolution of 1956, David created some of the defining images of London in the 1960s. He also captured memorable images of late-twentieth-century America and has spent half a century documenting his native Wales, examining what the idea of culture means for people and places across the nation.

David established the famous Newport School of Documentary Photography in 1973 and ran it until 1989, training a generation of some of the most innovative and successful photographers. He is also author with the late Bill Jay of On Being a Photographer (1997), a hugely popular discussion on the experience and practice of photography. David gave his last public lecture at JOMEC on 15 February 2020 (‘Key Decisions of a Magnum Photographer’) in association with the Royal Photographic Society. On 20 October 2020 he is due to receive a Lucie Award in a ceremony at Carnegie Hall honouring achievements in photography.

Dr Mathew Charles

Dr Mathew Charles is a journalist with twenty years of experience in television, radio and print. He has worked for major news organisations, including the BBC, CNN and AFP. He is an award-winning filmmaker and has a PhD from JOMEC at Cardiff University. Currently based in Bogotá, Colombia, Mathew works as a freelance foreign correspondent for the BBC and The Telegraph. His research examines the intersection of citizenship and journalism in contexts of organised crime and conflict. He has taught on journalism and anthropology/sociology courses at Bournemouth University and Goldsmiths College, London.

Dr Prasun Sonwalkar

Dr Prasun Sonwalkar is a London-based journalist reporting the UK and Europe for various international news organisations. After a career reporting key events in India and south Asia since the early 1980s, he completed a PhD from the University of Leicester on a Commonwealth Scholarship and taught for a decade at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and Bournemouth University. He has been a Press Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. His research on international journalism, media and political violence, journalism practice and journalism history has been published in several journals and edited collections.

Recent visiting fellows

Professor Emel Başturk

Emel is a Professor at the Department of Faculty of Communication Journalism, Kocaeli University, Turkey. She was awarded her PhD at Ege University, Turkey (Institute of Social Science Journalism Programme), and received the title of Associate Professor in 2008 and Professor in 2014, in the field of Communication Science. She has published in news discourse, media, and gender studies, and cyberbullying.

Emel has been Head of the Journalism Department at Kocaeli University since she came to Cardiff for a research project, and has now just commenced a one-year sabbatical at JOMEC to carry out research titled “Local press and digital transformation in the context of sustainable journalism”.

This research will be conducted with the financial support of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey and the supervision of Professor Stuart Allan.

The research includes the digital transformation of local media and especially the change brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic process; it aims to deal with media, reader, and communication education dimensions. The one year study has been designed to find answers to questions such as readers' expectations, news following habits, changing journalism practices, and how this should be reflected in journalism education from the perspective of sustainable journalism through the British example.

Lisa Reutter

Lisa is a PhD fellow at the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She researches the datafication of public administration with a special focus on how data driven technology alters the welfare state. Lisa is part of the interdisciplinary research project Digital Infrastructures and Citizen Empowerment (DICE). She will spend two months as a visiting PhD fellow at the Data Justice lab working on her policy analysis of Norwegian datafication policy and the various conceptual logics employed. Her research is located at the intersection between the fields of public administration, sociology and science and technology studies. Lisa is enthusiastic about communicating her research to a variety of audiences, one of the highlights of which has been producing teaching material for Norwegian high school teachers on AI and society.

Arianna Bussoletti

Salla Tuomola

Salla Tuomola is a PhD student from the Tampere University, Finland. She will be in Cardiff for 6 months as an Erasmus+ trainee and visiting PhD student, working on the last article of her dissertation under supervision of Professor Karin Wahl-Jorgensen. In her work, she investigates public debate on refugee coverage, especially in anti-immigrant alternative media, focusing on right-wing populist rhetoric, emotions and polarization.

In Finland, she gathered the data mainly from the ’MV-lehti’ (straight translation would be the ’WTF magazine’), which has a strong right-wing populist and anti-immigrant agenda. It is a reflective online outlet based on criticism of mainstream media. In the UK, she will gather the data for her case study on the Breitbart London website, which is a comparable version of the MV-lehti.

Gulden Gursoy Ataman

Gulden Gursoy Ataman is a visiting PhD candidate and research assistant from the Journalism Department of Ankara University in Turkey. Her ongoing PhD work focuses on journalism and the production of human rights news in Turkey in the 1990s.

Didde Elnif

Didde Elnif is a PhD scholar and journalistic lecturer from Centre for Journalism at University of Southern (SDU), Denmark. Her PhD project originated from working as a social media editor, wondering why every conversation about journalism and social media ended up focusing on generating traffic or about branding, and seldom about purpose of journalism or the actual content. In her project she explores how news media can redefine it’s use of social media – especially Facebook – to substantiate its core functioning in society, focusing on supporting and assisting deliberation, and enlightenment of the public for the public good.

Past visiting fellows

Chris Peters

Chris Peters is Associate Professor of Media and Communication at Aalborg University’s Copenhagen campus, Denmark. His research investigates the changing experiences, visualities, and spatiotemporal aspects of information in a digital era, and the sociocultural transformations associated with this in everyday life. His research is especially focused on news audiences and the meanings people make from journalism in a digital era. In tandem, he weighs this against the shifting media landscape and how it forces information distributors – and the news industry specifically – to reconsider their expectations, approaches, and impact.

Dr Saara Ratilainen

Dr Saara Ratilainen is a visiting academic at the School until 9 December 2018. Saara is based at the University of Helsinki, Aleksanteri-institute where she is a Postdoctoral researcher. Currently Saara works on her research project on Russian digital media and tackles it from the perspective of technological globalization and transnational cultural flows. Her case studies include Russian web series, online fan communities and new generation of digital magazines. Saara also collaborates on Galina Miazhevich’s research project ‘A Quiet Revolution? Discursive Representations of Non-heteronormative Sexuality’. Saara’s latest publication is the special issue ‘Culture in Putin’s Russia: Institutions, Industries, Policies’ co-edited with Sanna Turoma and Elena Trubina and published in Cultural Studies (vol 32, no 5, 2018). Saara is currently finalising a special issue for Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media on women and technology in the post-Soviet context.

Sergul Tasdemir

Sergul Tasdemir is a visiting PhD fellow from the Communications Department of Galatasaray University in Turkey. After receiving her MA degree in European Studies from Sciences Po Paris, she worked for the news channel CNN Turk as a correspondent covering local and foreign news. Her ongoing PhD research focuses on Media Ethics and Cosmopolitanism in BBC World News. Meanwhile, she works as a freelance editor for the news site Journo.com, a media organization aiming to enhance the quality of journalism practices in Turkey.

Valgerður Jóhannsdóttir

Valgerður Jóhannsdóttir is the head of the master's programme in Journalism at the University of Iceland and a PhD student in journalism at Roskilde University in Denmark. Her ongoing PhD thesis focuses on the state of the news media in Iceland times of great change in the media environment.

Lu Pengcheng

Lu Pengcheng is an associate professor of School of Communication at East China Normal University. His research focuses on the history of journalism in modern China. As a visiting fellow, he is now working on a research project 'The cooperation and competition between foreign Chinese reporters and Chinese reporters', supervised by Professor Stuart Allan.

Henri Assogba

Henri Assogba is an Associate Professor of Journalism in the Department of Information and Communication at Université Laval (Quebec city – Canada). His main fields of research are the media treatment of environmental issues, environmental journalism, changes in journalistic practices, radio studies, media and democracy in French sub-Saharan Africa.

He is a regular researcher for the Centre interdisciplinaire de recherche sur l’Afrique et le Moyen-Orient and the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur la communication, l’information et la société. He has recently coordinated a special issue for the scientific journal Communication on the real and imagined audience of Internet professionals and co-authored the book about the impact of the digital revolution in the Quebec newspaper and printing industry.

Atiya Dar

Atiya Dar is a PhD student in the Department of Communication Studies at BZU in Multan, Pakistan. She is conducting her research on “News Media Agenda on the Environment: A Transnational Comparative Analysis of Pakistan and Britain.”  A major area of her research is a quantitative study of news framing. She has also published research articles in well-reputed journals in Pakistan. Her areas of interest are political communication, psychological effects of political talk shows and radio broadcasting.

Fozia Perveen

Fozia Perveen is a PhD student in the Department of Communication Studies at BZU in Multan, Pakistan, and completed her Master's degree in Communication Studies from BZU Multan in 2005. She works as a public relations officer and is deputy assistant director of a media monitoring unit.  She has completed a Public Affairs Qualifications Course (PAQC) from the Defence Information School, USA, and attended various public affairs workshops inland and abroad. Her PhD research topic at BZU is 'Press Military relations in Pakistan: An editorial analysis of elite Pakistani newspapers.

Dr Jaspal Kaur Sadhu Singh

Dr Jaspal Kaur Sadhu Singh, a Senior Lecturer from HELP University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, is an academic with a predilection for treating the law as a living organism, Jaspal attempts to balance her interests in both traditional and emerging areas of law in Malaysia. She specialises in Legal Systems, Law of Information and Communication Technology and Media Law, particularly free speech and expression.

Professor Yun Long

Professor Yun Long was a visiting academic at JOMEC. Her paper (co-authorship) entitled Journalism and Education in China: The Reality and Challenges in Digital Era (Coauthored) was published by the special issue of the Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies (AJMS) in March 2016.

Associate Professor Jake Lynch

Associate Professor Jake Lynch is the Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, an Executive Member of the Sydney Peace Foundation and a Senior Research Fellow of the School of Communication at the University of Johannesburg.

Niko Hatakka

Niko Hatakka was a visiting PhD candidate from the Centre for Parliamentary Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. Niko worked on two journal articles on the interactions of far-right online activism, populist party-communication and political journalism.

Dr Shahzad Ali

Dr Shahzad Ali was associated to Cardiff's School of Journalism, Media and Culture for the period of one year with regard to his Postdoctoral fellowship offered and funded by Higher Education Commission, Government of Pakistan under the supervision of Professor Stuart Allan.

Dr Juliane Lischka

Dr Juliane Lischka visited us from the University of Zurich in Switzerland and supported research within the news media theme of the ESRC funded project 'Digital Citizenship and Surveillance Society'.

Professor Jesús Arroyave

Professor Jesús Arroyave was a visiting scholar (funded by the University’s Incoming Visiting Fellowship Scheme). Jesús, is an Associate Professor and Director, at the School of Communication, Universidad del Norte, in Barranquilla, Colombia.

Example - Past visiting fellows