Dr Ana Cristina Suzina

Dr Ana Cristina Suzina is specialist in communication and social change with expertise in grassroots social movements, popular and participatory communication, science communication, advocacy, communication epistemologies, media and democracy and power asymmetries.

Dr Ana Cristina Suzina is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Creative Industries. She recently concluded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Loughborough University London, after serving one year as Doctoral Prize Fellow, a very prestigious fellowship to which the university selects and supports high skilled early career researchers to impulse their career development. Her current research deals with media initiatives in indigenous communities in Brazil and Ecuador, analysing political imagination and political voice. She is also developing a new project on technologies for autonomy with grassroots organizations in Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico. Her research interests include social change, power asymmetries, media appropriation, participation in democracy, civil society development, grassroots communication, particularly focused in Latin American societies.

Dr. Suzina is a prolific researcher, editor and writer, and lecturer on communications in several countries. She has published and coordinated publications in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. She is co-editor of the Bulletin of Latin American Research (BLAR), published by the Society of Latin American Studies (SLAS), and of Interactions Journal: Studies in Communication and Culture. For around 15 years, Dr Suzina also worked as specialist in communication and social change with expertise in social organizations and corporate social responsibility, mainly in the fields of children’s rights and nature conservation. She has also volunteered with Brazilian and Latin American organizations to train young communicators motivated to promote causes, by organizing seminars, producing manuals, and planning campaigns.

Together with Professor Thomas Tufte, she has been leading a series of activities around the global legacy of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire in communication, development and social change.

Academic background

Dr Suzina graduated with a bachelor's in Journalism (UEPG, 1998) with compliments for the final essay discussing community newspapers.

She holds two PG Certificates with Brazilian public universities, in Cultural History (UEPG, 2000) and Political Sociology (UFPR, 2006). She also has a master's degree in Political Science and PhD in Social and Political Sciences both awarded by the Université Catholique de Louvain in 2012 (Distinction) and 2018 (funded by CAPES). Dr Suzina completed a PG Certificate in Learning and Teaching in High Education at Loughborough University in 2025 (Distinction), obtaining the Fellowship of High Education Academy (FHEA).

Dr Suzina has received an International Award for Excellence in Journalism – National Level, from International Catholic Union of Press (UCIP).

Dr Ana Cristina Suzina's research sits at the intersection of media and communication studies, international development, political participation, social change, and decolonial knowledge production. Her work is particularly concerned with how communication can contribute to more equitable and democratic societies, especially in Latin America and the Global South. Across her publications and projects, she explores the role of popular, community and alternative media; communication for social change; Indigenous and local knowledge systems; participatory communication; political imagination; climate and environmental communication; and epistemic justice in global knowledge production.

A central thread throughout her research is the development of communication theories and methodologies that emerge from Southern experiences and perspectives, challenging Western-centric approaches and creating space for alternative ways of knowing, communicating and imagining futures.

Areas of Research Expertise

1. Popular, Community and Alternative Media

Ana Cristina Suzina is an internationally recognized scholar of popular and community communication in Latin America. Her work examines how grassroots media organizations create spaces for political participation, representation and social transformation. She has documented the historical evolution of popular communication and its adaptation to contemporary digital environments. Her research highlights the democratic role of community media in addressing inequalities in public debate and amplifying marginalized voices.

2. Communication for Social Change and Participatory Communication

Her research investigates communication as a process of empowerment, dialogue and collective action. Drawing heavily on Paulo Freire's legacy, she studies how communicative practices contribute to citizenship, social movements and community development. She explores participation both as a theoretical concept and as a lived practice. Her work seeks to understand how communication can support social justice, democratic engagement and transformative social change.

3. Decolonial and Southern Communication Theories

A major area of expertise is the development of communication theory from Global South perspectives. She critiques epistemological dependence on Northern frameworks and promotes alternative conceptualizations grounded in Latin American, Indigenous and participatory traditions. Her publications engage with de-westernization, cognitive justice and epistemic pluralism. She has become a leading contributor to debates on Southern epistemologies in communication studies.

4. Indigenous Communication and Political Imagination

Through extensive fieldwork in the Amazon and with Indigenous communities in Ecuador and Brazil, she examines Indigenous communicative practices, storytelling, memory and collective futures. Her work on the Kichwa people of Sarayaku and Amazonian riverside communities explores how communication sustains identities, resistance and alternative development paradigms. She is particularly interested in how political imagination becomes political voice. This research has informed her Leverhulme-funded project on youth and future-making in the Amazon.

5. Media, Democracy and Political Participation

Her scholarship investigates the relationship between communication and democratic life, especially in contexts of inequality and political polarization. She has developed the concept of "asymmetric democracy" to analyse power inequities in media systems and public representation. Her research addresses digital disruption, media concentration, citizen participation and social movements. Brazil's democratic crises and political transformations have provided an important empirical focus.

6. Digital Media, Activism and Social Movements

Suzina studies how activists, communities and social movements use digital media to organise, mobilise and produce alternative narratives. She explores the opportunities and limitations of digital technologies for participatory communication. Her work examines media activism, networked resistance and online-offline communication dynamics. Special attention is given to forms of grassroots digital engagement in Latin America.

7. Climate, Environmental and Ecological Communication

Her research increasingly engages with environmental communication, climate justice and ecological thought. She investigates how communities, Indigenous groups and environmental movements communicate alternative relationships with nature. Her work links environmental sustainability, local knowledge and communication practices. Current projects focus on Amazonian communities and ecological worldviews that challenge dominant development paradigms.

8. Language, Knowledge Production and Global Inequalities in Academia

A distinct strand of her work focuses on language politics and epistemic inequalities in global scholarship. Her influential publications on English as a lingua franca critique linguistic hierarchies in academic publishing. She advocates multilingual science and equitable knowledge exchange. This research contributes to broader debates on decolonizing academia and transforming international research cultures.

Current research and collaborations

Dr Suzina is working on research with indigenous and traditional communities in the Amazon region, in Brazil (Sao Pedro de Arapiuns) and Ecuador (Sarayaku). She is analysing the evolution from political imagination to political voice, recovering the history of two past struggles in which media platforms were used to increase the visibility and the power of community narratives.

She is also collaborating with the Landless Workers Movement (Brazil), the Indigenous Kichwa People of Sarayaku (Ecuador), and Redes ALC (Mexico) in a new research project on technologies for autonomy.

Dr Suzina is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Centre d'Analyse et de Recherche Interdisciplinaires sur les Médias (CARISM), Université Pantheon-Assas, Paris, France (2026-2027) and at the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Estudos da Mídia (PPgEM) da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil (2026-).

Research Supervision

Completed

Postdoctoral Supervision

• Dr Bibiana Serpa, IAS International Residential Fellow. Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro / NGO Nem Presa Nem Morta. Residential fellowship hosted in September 2025

PhD Supervision

• Sangeeta Menon: Illuminating the Last Trolley: Exploring the Role of Alternative Media in the Indian Farmer’s Protest (2022-2026, passed with no corrections). AHRC Techné Doctoral Fellow. Lead Supervisor, Co-Supervisor Prof. Emily Keightley

PhD Research Stay Supervision

• Antonio Carlos de Sousa, ESPM (Brazil): Comunicação, consumo e cidadania: transformações no discurso político para um consumo alimentar saudável afro-brasileiro. Research Stay June-November 2024, CAPES.
• Petronilio Ferreira, Universidade Federal Fluminense (Brazil): A Comunicação Populista da TV Jovem Pan News na institucionalização do bolsonarismo. Research Stay October 2025-March 2026, CAPES.

Ongoing

• Zoi Malla: The "Cancelatory Figure": An Exploration of the Ethos of Cancel Culture (2024-). Lead Supervisor, Co-Supervisor Prof. Aidan McGarry
• Luiz Ribeiro Sales Fonseca: Echoes from Anthropocene: Confluences Between Ecological Sound Art and Ecosocialist Activism in Brazil (2025-). AHRC Techné Doctoral Fellow. Co-Supervisor, Lead Supervisor Dr Courtney N. Reed, Prof. Jo Tacchi

Master’s Dissertation

Since 2020, she has supervised more than 20 Master's dissertations across Communicatio and Media, Media and Creative Industries, Digital Media and Creative Industries, International Development, Global Communication and Social Change.

Key thematic areas supervised include Platform studies and social media, Climate communication, Linguistic imperialism and academic publishing, Film and media industries, Crisis communication, Body politics and representation, Science communication, Development communication, Humanitarian communication, Digital consumption and influencer cultures, among others.

Notable achievement:

• Suvetha Kamalanathan (2025). Dissertation How Do Development Journals Perpetuate Linguistic Imperialism? awarded IDIA Best Dissertation 2024-2025
   

Dr Suzina is a member of the following associations:

• International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR): elected member of the International Council (2024-2028)
• Tierra Común
• European Consortium for Political Research (EPCR)
• Asociación Latino Americana de Investigación en Comunicación (ALAIC)
• Núcleo de Estudos de Comunicação Comunitária e Mídia Local (COMUNI, Brazil)