Staff Profile

The intersection between digital media cultures, conflict and politics has been the focus of my primary research to date with a specific interest in the scholarly aspects of civic engagement and political participation, such as investigations into online activism, social movements, and insurgencies involving radical conflict.

I have authored articles and a monograph about the political movements in Nigeria and how they use the internet and communication technologies. My doctoral research at Hull University used the cyberconflict framework, which draws on social movement, conflict, and media theories, to investigate the organizational and digital components of conflict mobilization among ethnoreligious and sociopolitical movements in Nigeria.

The rise in fake news, disinformation, and misinformation during political participation in the digital arena and the emergent harms including democratic disruptions, particularly in non-Western environments like Africa where research is still in its infancy, heightened new areas of scholarly interest.

Currently, I am a Research Associate in Sociology/ Communication Studies at Newcastle University. I previously worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Leicester where I also held positions as a Research Associate and Research Assistant on several multidisciplinary projects. In addition, I held a Research Assistant position at Bangor University before joining Newcastle University.

Along with my research projects, I served as a Tutor for Media Movements and Radical Politics at the University of Hull and subsequently as an Instructor for Crime and the Media at Bangor University.

Qualifications

PhD in Media Studies (Hull)

PGCert in Research Training (Hull)

Master of Research in Media (Bangor)

LLM International Law (Hertfordshire)

BSc in Mass Communication (Hertfordshire)

Diploma in Mass Communication (Jos)

Currently, I am a Research Associate at Newcastle University on the ‘AGENCY: Assuring Citizen Agency in a World with Complex Online Harms’ (2022-2025), an EPSRC funded project which interrogates complex online harms and citizen autonomy and agency.

Before joining Newcastle University, I served as a DigiGen Research Fellow at the University of Leicester on the H2020 project for the European Commission DigiGen THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATIONS ON THE DIGITAL GENERATION, contributing to several work packages on ICT and Civic Participation (2019-2022) https://www.digigen.eu. 

Other

Research Associate - University of Leicester: IRDF ODA: COVID-19 Urgency Call: COVID19 Disinformation and Response in India, Malaysia, Philippines, and Thailand: A Comparative Social Network Analysis Study on Twitter (2020-2021).

Research Assistant - Bangor University: ‘Achieving Net Zero: A Feasibility Study into the Technical and Communicative Challenges to using Waste Heat from Nuclear Power to Heat Greenhouses. NERC Interdisciplinary Research Project’ (2022).

Research Assistant – University of Leicester: ‘Re-imagining the ‘Homogenocene’ as a safe and resilient place for life on Earth.’ Leicester Institute of Advanced Studies (LIAS) (2020/2021).

Research Assistant - University of Leicester: ‘Digital geographies of Discourses and changing spatial practices in the era of covid19 contact-tracing apps.’ Leicester Institute of Advance Studies (LIAS) (2020).