Ammina Kothari - Featured Faculty 2016

Trained as an journalist and media scholar, her research focuses on global communication and journalism practices with special focus on conflicts, health, gender, technology and religion. She is especially interested in understanding the processes which shape social and political discourses about conflicts, crises and health issues. She employs a range of qualitative and quantitative methods including in-depth interviews, textual, discourse and content analyses and structural equation modeling in her research.

She perceives Escher's "Drawing Hands"-a lithograph in which hands sketch one another, as a metaphor for how her teaching and scholarship inspire and fuel each other. She strives to create a teaching environment that facilitates learning through construction of knowledge as a joint endeavor, de-emphasizing the distinction between teaching and learning. Many of the courses she has taught have followed from and given impetus to her research interests. She is currently working on one grant funded and two collaborative projects.

The project titled 'UK Media Coverage of the Syrian Humanitarian Crisis,' funded by Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication's Emerging Scholar grant focuses on media's coverage of the Syrian civil war and the resulting humanitarian crisis. Drawing on framing and gatekeeping theories, the study investigates how the British media have been framing the Syrian crisis and what gatekeeping factors influence journalists in their reporting. A framing analysis of stories published by BBC, The Guardian, The Independent and ITV is complemented by interviews with journalists. I am also working on a collaborative project titled "Setting the Agenda on Immigration: Media Coverage of Primary Presidential Debate" which focuses on content analysis of the Fox News Republican Debate's coverage by Fox News, CNN, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Politico and The Hill. The focus is on identifying news organizations that played a leading role in signaling to other media outlets what issues, figures, and attributes related to immigration were important to report on. The second collaborative project titled 'Teaching Journalism in a Post-Truth Age' examines how journalism educators are revising their curriculum to address both changes brought by the automation of storytelling through algorithms and bots, and the post-truth political environment. We are surveying an international sample of journalism faculty and students to compare how both groups perceive and believe they should respond to threats to objectivity, transparency, and fact-checking in the journalism field.

Ammina Kothari
Assistant Professor
College of Liberal Arts