Wendy Willems

Experience Keywords

mediated encounters; civic agency and resistance; global digital culture; mobile information technology; mobile phones; mobile publics; popular culture and performance; postcolonial publics; social change; social media

Research Summary

Dr Wendy Willems is Assistant Professor in the LSE Department of Media and Communications. Her research interests include global digital culture and social change; postcolonial/decolonial approaches to media and communications; media culture and neoliberalism in the Global South; and popular culture, performance and politics in Africa. She holds a PhD in Media and Film Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She joined the LSE Department of Media and Communications in January 2013. Prior to that, she was Head of Department and Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa (2010-2012). In 2006, she co-founded the Journal of African Media Studies (JAMS) with Dr Winston Mano from the University of Westminster. Wendy is currently working on two monographs. Her first book project, ‘Postcolonial Publics, Mediated Encounters and the Performance of Resistance’, offers a postcolonial/decolonial critique of arguments on the ‘global’ or ‘transnational’ public sphere. Her second book project, provisionally entitled ‘Mobile Publics, Platform Power and Urban Civic Engagement’, interrogates the relation between digital media and social change in Zambia through a global analytical lens.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/Mediafrica.aspx

Research Countries

Africa; South Africa; Zambia; Zimbabwe