2025 Lillian Lodge Kopenhaver Award Recipient
Congrats to Dr. Rana Arafat, City St. George’s University of London, who is the winner of the 2025 Lillian Lodge Kopenhaver Early-Career Woman Scholar Award.
Sponsored by The Lillian Lodge Kopenhaver Center for the Advancement of Women in Communication at Florida International University and the AEJMC Commission on the Status of Women, this recognition is designed to honor early-career women faculty researchers and encourage them as they pursue their research agendas in the academy.
Dr. Rana Arafat is an award-winning (senior lecturer) assistant professor in digital journalism at the Department of Journalism in City St George’s, University of London. She holds a PhD degree in Journalism from the Institute of Media and Journalism (IMeG) at Universita della Svizzera italiana in Switzerland. Her research agenda focuses on examining advocacy journalism, digital activism, and journalism innovations, including the adoption of automation and AI technologies in non-Western newsrooms. She is committed to investigating understudied media ecosystems in conflict-ridden and restrictive media environments in the Global South. By amplifying the voices of diaspora journalists and examining the intersection of digital transformation and press freedom, her research agenda focuses on achieving significant real-world impact, particularly through engagement with journalists, media organizations, NGOs, and policymakers.
Her research has been published in leading academic journals, including Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice, Emerging Media, and Media, War & Conflict, among others. She has also received several prestigious honors, such as the ICA Wolfgang Donsbach Outstanding Journal Article of the Year Award, the 2022 AEJMC Nafziger-White-Salwen Dissertation Award, and the IAMCR 2020 Dallas Smythe Prize.
The award will be presented during AEJMC’s San Francisco conference this August.
For further information, contact Lillian A. Abreu labreu@fiu.edu