Media is a powerful tool that shapes our everyday lives. But how do others worldwide engage with media and harness its power for social change?

In this episode, we’ll talk with Azeta Hatef, Assistant Professor of Journalism, who studies how marginalized groups—such as women in Afghanistan and the Czech Republic's Roma community —find ways to shape their own identity by engaging the media.

ABOUT OUR GUEST...Azeta joined Emerson's Journalism faculty in the summer of 2019. She is a media researcher and award-winning instructor whose academic interests focus on issues of social media as activism for underrepresented groups, gender and identity, and media systems in a global context. She has conducted research in Afghanistan examining the complex global beauty industry, including analysis of the post-feminist politics of choice, ethnic/class politics, and consumerism in Afghanistan. In 2017-2018, Hatef was the recipient of a Fulbright Research Scholarship in the Czech Republic. Her research examined minority media production and social media engagement among Romani activists to better understand the contextualized dynamics of these mediated spaces in providing marginalized groups places to negotiate identities, build communities, and experience feelings of belongingness.