Welcome 2020-2021 Postdoctoral Fellows!

After another competitive search, the Center for Media at Risk at the Annenberg School for Communication is delighted to announce its Postdoctoral Fellows for 2020-2021.

We welcome these fellows whose research projects reflect our emphasis on free and critical media practice and scholarship, and we are again grateful for the generous support of Craig Newmark Philanthropies in helping to make this happen.  

Hearty congratulations to Richard Stupart and Zeyno Ustun! Richard, who is currently a Ph.D. researcher at LSE, will begin working with the Center this August. We are equally thrilled to welcome back Zeyno Ustun, who will expand upon the research that she started in 2019 on media at risk by taking a closer look at the specific threats to the digital geography inhabited by media scholars and practitioners today.


Richard Stupart (left) and Zeyno Ustun (right)

Richard Stupart is a researcher working on the practices and normative ethics of journalism of conflict. His current work explores the work of journalists reporting on conflict and its effects in Sudan, where he is interested in the role of affect/emotion and tactics of coping with risk by journalists working in conflict contexts, as well as practical ethical tensions that occur while reporting on the effects of the country’s war.

Richard has previously been a DAAD scholar in the conflict studies program at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy, and previous research has included work on media framing of the 2011 famine in Somalia and the politics of collective memory and archive-producing research in Kitgum, Northern Uganda. Richard’s work at the Center for Media at Risk will explore the affective dimensions of media intimidation and practices of ‘affective’ resistance amongst journalists working in situations of insecurity.

Zeyno Ustunreceived her Ph.D. in the department of Sociology at the New School For Social Research where she is a Fellow of the Integrative PhD Fellowship program, a Teaching Fellow at the Eugene Lang College at The New School and a researcher at Graph Commons. Ustun’s research begins with the political and legal aftermath of the Gezi Park Resistance, a nationwide networked movement that erupted in Istanbul, Turkey and quickly spread to the rest of the country via the tactical and strategic utilization of the Internet. Ustun will continue to map the historical, technical and bureaucratic processes and the social and political conditions facilitated not only the Gezi Resistance in Turkey and other networked movements of 21st century but also the rising influence of state surveillance.