j. Siguru Wahutu, Ph.D.

Wahutu’s work focuses the politics that African journalism fields are enmeshed in while constructing knowledge about genocide and mass atrocities in Africa for an African audience.

 j. Siguru Wahutu is an expert in the sociology of media, with an emphasis on genocide, mass violence, and ethnicity in sub-Saharan Africa.  His research interests include the effects of ethnicity and culture on the media representations of human rights violations, global and transnational news flows, postcolonial land claims, and the political economy of international media, with a regional emphasis on postcolonial Africa. His award-winning book, In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism in Postcolonial Africa (published by Cambridge University Press) offers an extensive account of media coverage of Darfur by various African states. When not studying media and genocide, he works on data privacy issues and media manipulation in African countries. This secondary research stream is the subject of his second book project currently under contract with MIT Press. He is an Assistant Professor of Sociology & African Studies at Yale University and a Fellow at the MacMillan Center of International and Area Studies at Yale. He is also a fellow at the Center for the Study of African Societies and Economies at Harvard University and the Center for Media at Risk at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.