Sydney L. Forde, Ph.D.

Sydney L. Forde studies the critical political economy of communications, exploring power and contradictions within both media and policy spaces, and applying critical theory to the role of the state in various media industries.

Sydney L. Forde received her Ph.D. from the Bellisario College of Communications at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on the critical political economy of communications and explores power and contradictions within both media and policy spaces. Her work applies critical theory to the role of the state within media industries fundamental to democratic society - specifically journalism and broadband - and challenges naturalized market based funding assumptions within those industries. Examining journalism as a merit good, and broadband as a public good, Forde’s research aims to understand the basic disconnect between mainstream media economics and policymaking, juxtaposed with the role of media in a democracy.

Forde was recently a Fellow at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, and received a national fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from the Government of Canada to complete her doctoral research. She has won top paper awards at the International Communication Association, the National Communication Association, and the Canadian Communication Association. Further, Forde helped establish the Pennsylvania Broadband Research (PBR) Institute between Penn State and UPenn, and is a member of the four-person U.S. Research Team for the Global Media & Internet Concentration Project (GMICP).

Forde’s work has been published in numerous journals, including Communication, Culture, & Critique; Journalism; tripleC: Communication, Capitalism and Critique; The Canadian Journal of Communication; and The Political Economy of Communication; as well as in multiple edited books on Journalism and Communications studies.