Dr Ana Suzina awarded Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship
Doctoral Prize Fellow, Dr Ana Cristina Suzina, from the Institute for Media and Creative Industries has been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship for her project entitled ‘Youth designing the future: Media usage and visions of development in the Amazon’.
These highly prestigious awards are intended to provide development opportunities for researchers in the early stages of their academic career, who have a proven record of research impact and excellence.
Ana’s project centres around how the protection of the Amazon depends highly on the way livelihood is envisaged. Her innovative research will investigate how young inhabitants of Amazon riverside communities consume and produce information to discuss how they build and voice their vision of development. It will analyse the availability of technological resources, how media uses relate to individual and collective goals, and the capacity for managing them. In short, it will explore transmissions of knowledge between youth and adults, the tension between tradition and modern, observing how young people combine different media to imagine and influence the path for the future.
To complete her project Ana will be completing field research in riverside communities in the Amazon region in the Brazilian and Ecuadorian territory, focusing on the way youth organize their ideas of development, exploring what kind of ideas, inspirations, images guide their actions in search of reaching development.
Dr Ana Cristina Suzina joined the Institute for Media and Creative Industries in October 2019, as a Doctoral Prize Fellow as part of the Excellence 100 initiative. During her time with the University, she has been studying the history of media appropriation by social movements and citizens in Brazil.
Ana undertook her PhD at Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium in June 2018. Her research discussed the political voice of social movements and community associations in Brazil, with a particular interest in the impact of digital transformations over the context of grassroots social struggles. Coming from the reflections during her dissertation, she is currently editing a book with Palgrave about the Latin American concept of popular communication and its contributions for the field of media and communication studies.
Before joining academia, Ana worked for 15 years as a communication practitioner in social organizations related with children’s rights and nature conservation, mainly in Brazil and Latin America.
For more information about Dr Ana Cristina Suzina and her research, please visit her staff profile.