The Center for Media at Risk is thrilled to welcome j. Siguru Wahutu as a visiting scholar and Arwa Mahdawi as a visiting practitioner for the 2025/26 academic year. Their residence is central to the Center’s role as a forum for media practitioners and scholars to strategize the effects of political intimidation on the media. As resident scholar and practitioner respectively, they will provide strategic guidance, give public colloquia, mentor the Center’s doctoral students and participate in the Center’s annual symposium.
An expert on the sociology of media with an emphasis on genocide, mass violence and ethnicity in sub-Saharan Africa, j. Siguru Wahutu has written extensively on global media patterns in covering genocide and the Kenyan media’s experimentation with social media platforms. His research has appeared in African Journalism Studies, African Affairs, the International Journal of Press/Politics, Global Media and Communication, Media and Communication, Media, Culture and Society and Sociological Forum. Wahutu is the author of In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism in Postcolonial Africa.
Wahutu joins the Center from Yale, where he is an assistant professor in the University’s Sociology department and Council on African Studies. Wahutu is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center of Internet and Society and a Fellow at the Center for the Study of African Societies and Economies, both at Harvard University. Expanding the Center’s 2024 programming on platform accountability in Kenya, Wahutu will bring essential expertise on data privacy and media manipulation across sub-Saharan Africa.
The Center is also honored to welcome journalist Arwa Mahdawi as a visiting practitioner for the 2025/26 academic year. Arwa is a columnist at The Guardian and part of Flaming Hydra, a worker-owned journalism cooperative. She covers an expansive beat, including everything from politics to pop culture, but her work often focuses on marginalized groups and systems of power.
Mahdawi writes a weekly Guardian column and Guardian newsletter called “The Week in Patriarchy,” which reviews the most important stories on feminism, sexism and those fighting for equality. She is also the creator of the satirical viral website Rent-A-Minority, which is an “Uber for diversity.” Arwa is the author of Strong Female Lead (Hodder, 2021), which makes the case for redefining how we think about leadership and contributed a chapter to Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic (Saqi, 2017), a Sunday Times Best Humour Book of the Year.
At the Center, Arwa will be developing a project focused on how newsrooms can better respond to the harassment and intimidation that has become an everyday occurrence for many journalists in the U.S.
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