St Mary's Hall S482
Telephone: 617-552-2680
Email: madenga@bc.edu
Black Popular Culture
Media Industries & the Internet
Censorship and Media
Global digital media, journalism, surveillance, censorship, satire, popular culture, post/decolonial methods and approaches
Florence Zivaishe Madenga (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Department and the African and African Diaspora Studies program at Boston College. She received her PhD in Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her core area of study is in journalistic practice, specifically how journalists and peripheral media-makers challenge or are affected by state censorship on digital platforms. Her most recent research focuses on iterations of humor and journalism in tricky political contexts, satire journalism’s affordances and limitations as a liberatory practice in Zimbabwe, “Black journalism” in the United States, and popular culture in the African diaspora.
Her writing and scholarship has been published in Information, Communication & Society, Media, Culture & Society, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, the International Journal of Communication and other journals. Prior to joining Boston College, Madenga was a George Gerbner Postdoctoral Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication, and a visiting instructor at Swarthmore College. She worked as a freelance writer both from the United States and internationally before graduate school. Her literary journalism has appeared on Buzzfeed, Chimurenga, and Narratively and other publications. She holds a journalism and politics B.A. and an interdisciplinary M.A from New York University.