Welcome 2019-2020 Postdoctoral Fellows!

After a competitive search, the Center for Media at Risk at the Annenberg School for Communication has appointed two new Postdoctoral Fellows for 2019-2020.

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

Congratulations to LaCharles Ward and Zeyno Ustun, who will join us on campus this August! 


LaCharles Ward (left) and Zeyno Ustun (right)

LaCharles Wardis an educator, writer and interdisciplinary scholar of black visual and cultural studies. He is a PhD Candidate in the Rhetoric and Public Culture Program in the School of Communication with graduate affiliation in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University. His research spans the areas of black visual culture as theory and method, black feminist theory, history and theories of photography, race and technology, materiality of death and black protest cultures. His scholarship is driven by a refusal to allow the State and other death producing entities to have the last word on Black life. When he is not teaching or writing, you can find him exploring his hometown of Chicago, eating his way through every city he visits, spending ample time in art museums, cooking and hosting friends and taking photographs that he has yet to share with the world.   

Zeyno Ustunis a PhD Candidate 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 aims 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.