The Center for Media at Risk is thrilled to announce its first cohort of Alumni Affiliates.
Affiliates provide ongoing assistance for Center efforts to probe the conditions which put media practitioners at risk and how they work to resist it. This year, six alumni joined the center’s community of media practitioners and scholars working to foster free and critical media.
Jasmine Erdener
Jasmine Erdener (ASC class of 2019) is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Visual Arts at Koç University in Istanbul. Her work is situated in media studies, feminist science and technology studies, and digital culture. She has written about depictions of the Global South in the popular blog Humans of New York (Communication and the Public, 2016), about activist media (Oxford Bibliographies, 2017), and about weaponizing infrastructure as a repressive communicative tool against refugees and migrants (Communication, Culture, and Critique, 2020).
More recently, her publications have focused on how cyborgs careen between two possible futures, either a militarized Robocop or a techno-utopia in which humans live in harmony with nature (Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2021). She has written about social movements and political organizing at the historic Bread and Puppet Theater (Cultural Politics, 2024). Her latest article examined a viral meme depicting the FBI as a friend or personal companion, reflecting contemporary anxieties around mass surveillance (Surveillance & Society, 2024). She is currently working on her next project about technologies that replicate the dead, a vision of life after death that is reliant on big data, AI, and surveillance. She lives in the beautiful city of Istanbul with her cat Zeytin who is the littlest puff on the puffiest cloud.
Nour Halabi
Nour Halabi is an Interdisciplinary Fellow at the University of Aberdeen. She is the Vice-Chair of the Race Network of the Media Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) and former Secretary of the Ethnicity and Race Division in the International Communication Association. Her research examines the interactions between mobility, social movements and global media and discourse. She is author of Radical Hospitality: American Policy, Media, and Immigration (Winner of the MeCCSA Outstanding Achievement Award: Monograph of the Year, 2023) and co-editor of Middle Eastern Television Drama: Politics, Aesthetics, Practices (eds. Salamandra & Halabi, 2023) and Discourses in Action (eds. Krippendorff & Halabi, 2020). Her research also appears in Middle East Critique (2019), Space and Culture, International Journal of Communication and other academic journals. She received her doctorate from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Masters from The London School of Economics and Bachelors from Paris (IV) Sorbonne.
Jennifer Henrichsen
Dr. Jennifer R. Henrichsen is an Assistant Professor at the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University, Senior Personnel with the VICEROY Northwest Institute for Cybersecurity Education and Research (CySER), an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, an Affiliated Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Media, Inequality & Change Center, and an Alumni Affiliate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Media at Risk. Henrichsen examines (1) the ongoing erosion of democratic society amidst rising polarization, authoritarianism, and constitutional rot by assessing how malicious actors wield emerging technologies alongside analog methods to denigrate and disrupt journalistic work, safety, and well-being, and (2) how to strengthen trust in knowledge systems and institutions by enhancing journalists’ and news organizations’ abilities to meet the challenges, threats, and attacks facing them.
Henrichsen’s work has resulted in 23 publications, including three books and 10 peer-reviewed journal articles. She twice has been a consultant to UNESCO where she produced global reports on the state of journalism. Henrichsen is published in Columbia Journalism Review and Poynter, and she was previously a political correspondent. Henrichsen has received 10 fellowships, including from Yale, Columbia University, the University of Fribourg, and the Knight Foundation. Henrichsen also serves as an Academic Expert for the Safety of Journalists Consortium, the Journalism Safety Research Network, and the Local News Impact Consortium. Her research has been profiled in outlets including, The New York Times, NPR, Nieman Lab, and Columbia Journalism Review.
Perry B. Johnson
@perrybjohnson; @thesoundofvictory
Perry B. Johnson, Ph.D., is a music scholar, cultural historian, and producer of several public-facing music and humanities projects. Her primary research and practice focus on music, popular culture and American cultural histories, with an emphasis on archives, public scholarship, power, identity and belonging. She is at work on the manuscript for her first book, a cultural history of sexual misconduct in America’s popular music industries and working to develop an accompanying database that captures and maps allegations of misconduct. Johnson teaches in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Johnson is also the co-director (with Dr. Courtney M. Cox, University of Oregon) of The Sound of Victory (SOV) and co-host of Sounding Off. Johnson is developing two book projects. First, an interdisciplinary edited volume, The Sound of Victory: Music, Sport, and Society (forthcoming from NYU Press), that joins scholars and practitioners to critically examine the relationship between music/sound and sport through engagement with key moments, movements, figures and sports. Second, an examination of the NFL’s Super Bowl halftime show, which details a nuanced cultural history of this American entertainment spectacle. Johnson received her Ph.D. in communication from USC Annenberg, where she had a graduate affiliation in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies and was a research fellow with The Popular Music Project at USC Annenberg’s Norman Lear Center. Prior to returning to Annenberg, Johnson was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Media at Risk with a joint appointment at the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. In her production work, Johnson has produced events at The Getty Center, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Hammer Museum, La Brea Tar Pits, The Ebell of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles’ historic Palace Theatre, Regent Theater, and more.
Hanna E. Morris
Dr. Hanna E. Morris is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto with expertise in climate change media and critical methods of cultural analysis. Her research concentrates on the climate-media-democracy nexus and explores questions of power, identity-formation, and meaning-making around climate change. She is the co-chair of the Critical Studies of Climate Media, Discourse, and Power Working Group a part of Brown University’s Climate Social Science Network (CSSN) and an appointed member of the Board of Directors for the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA). Her newest book is entitled Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power (Oxford University Press, 2025). Her research has been published in various peer-reviewed journals including Environmental Communication, Journal of Language and Politics, Journal of Environmental Media, Media Theory, Politique Américaine, and Places Journal. She also co-edited the book entitled Climate Change and Journalism: Negotiating Rifts of Time (Routledge, 2021). Her scholarship has been recognized by the Connaught New Researcher Award from the University of Toronto, Stuart Hall Award from the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), New Directions for Climate Communication Research Fellowship from the IECA and IAMCR, and Top Paper Awards from the International Communication Association (ICA) and Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS).
Richard Stupart
Richard is a Lecturer (assistant professor) in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool and a 2025 African Diaspora Fellow for the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. He completed his PhD at the London School of Economics, with a thesis exploring the ethics and practices of journalistic witnessing in South Sudan that was awarded the Firoz Lalji PhD Thesis Prize in 2020. Richard has previously been a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Media at Risk at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and an assistant professor at the Center for Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He is broadly interested in the practical and philosophical issues that arise when violence, media and ethics intersect. This includes work on the ethics and practices of witnessing in wartime and humanitarian situations; affect and emotion in journalism and media work; humanitarian communication; the mediation of war; ethics of humanitarian image-making and circulation and the epistemic structures of conflict spaces. Richard has published in journals including Journalism, Journalism Practice and Media, War and Conflict, as well as presenting at IAMCR, ICA and ISA. He is also presently the chair of the ECREA temporary working group on the ethics of mediated suffering, the coordinator of the Witnessing reading group, and the desk editor for Media, War and Conflict.
