2022: Dr. Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed wins Paula Kantor Award.

2022: Dr. Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed wins Paula Kantor Award.

Dr. Wunpini Fatimata Mohammed has been named winner of the 2022 Paula Kantor Award.

The award was created to honor Paula Kantor, a former International Center For Research On Women (ICRW) researcher who was killed in 2015 while working in Afghanistan.

Paula was a leading expert on gender issues in international development, with nearly 20 years of experience in policy and program research related to integrating gender into agriculture and rural development.

Dr. Kantor’s work was largely driven by her passion to improve lives in low- and middle-income countries, especially those of women and girls.

This year, ICRW is proud to honor Dr. Mohammed, assistant professor of global media at the University of Georgia. Born and raised in Tamale, Ghana.

Dr. Mohammed completed her PhD in Mass Communications with a minor in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and an African Studies concentration at the Bellisario College of Communications at Pennsylvania State University.

Her research examines the way that the lived experience of marginalized people (women, LGBTQIA+ people, those from other marginalized ethnic groups, etc.) are shaped by and represented in media.

She explores the ways in which media can be used for social change through political and feminist organizing, how media can be used as a tool to affirm marginalized communities and how it can be used as a tool of resistance in the face of imperialism and colonization.

Dr. Mohammed is co-editor of the forthcoming book African Women in Digital Spaces: Redefining Social Movements on the Continent and in the Diaspora.

Her research, which focuses on feminisms, decolonization, broadcast media, and development communication, have appeared in Communication Theory, Review of Communication, the Howard Journal of Communications, African Journalism Studies, and other reputable media and communications journals.

Also, She has won top paper awards at the International Communication Association (ICA) conference, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) conference, the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) conference, and the National Association of African American Studies (NAAAS) conference.

Dr. Mohammed is currently a Lilly Teaching Fellow (2021-2023) and was selected as a Kopenhaver Fellow in August 2021. She is a member of Silent Majority, Ghana, a transnational queer feminist collective.

She has worked as a radio journalist in Ghana for several years and has done some public scholarship with Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and a number of Ghanaian media platforms, including the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation.

Source: icrw.org