Areas of Interest
Knowledge | Media | Global & Transnational Sociology | Genocide and Mass Atrocity | Data & Privacy | Africa South of Sahara
j. Siguru Wahutu is an Assistant Professor of Sociology & African Studies at Yale University and a Fellow at the MacMillan Center of International and Area Studies. He is also a Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for the Study of African Societies and Economies and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. His research examines how ethnicity and culture shape media representations of human rights violations, the dynamics of global and transnational news flows, postcolonial land claims, and the political economy of international media, with a particular focus on postcolonial Africa. Wahutu is the author of the award-winning In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism in Postcolonial Africa which offers an in-depth analysis of African media coverage of the Darfur conflict. His second book project Silicon Colonists: The 21st century scramble for Africa, explores data privacy, media manipulation, and digital governance across African states.
His scholarship appears in African Journalism Studies, African Affairs, the International Journal of Press/Politics, Global Media and Communication, Media, Culture, and Society, Media and Communication, and Sociological Forum.
Book
Wahutu, j. S. 2024. In the Shadow of the Global North: Journalism in Postcolonial Africa. Cambridge University Press.
In the Shadow of the Global North unpacks the historical, cultural, and institutional forces that organize and circulate journalistic narratives in Africa to show that something complex is unfolding in the postcolonial context of global journalistic landscapes, especially the relationships between cosmopolitan and national journalistic fields. Departing from the typical discourse about journalistic depictions of Africa In the Shadow turns our focus to the underexplored journalistic representations created by African journalists reporting on African countries. In assessing news narratives and the social context within which journalists construct these narratives, In the Shadow captures not only the marginalization of African narratives by African journalists but opens up an important conversation about what it means to be an African journalist, an African news organization, and African in the Postcolony.