Profile
Dr. Jessica Noske-Turner is a scholar in media and communication for development social change. She teaches communication and social change, global media, research methods and leads the Learning from the Global South: Field Trip module.
Her current research explores the changing relationships between traditional development actors (UN agencies, donors), for-profit actors (corporates, philanthropic foundations, enterprises, commercial media) and non-profit actors (local NGOs, civil society organisations, Disabled Persons Organisations, community groups), with a particular curiosity about the implications of these profound shifts for local actors and their modes of adaptation and resistance.
She led an AHRC-funded project *Un/Making CSC: A Critical Engagement with Communication for Social Changemaking* and is also a Co-Investigator on the Overcoming Stigma through Paralympic Sport project partnering with the International Paralympic Committee and the University of Malawi.
She has been involved in research with both large international organisations as well as smaller locally led NGOs and civil society groups including in Cambodia, the Pacific, Vietnam, India, and Malawi.
Her work typically uses participatory action research approaches combined with arts-based creative research methods leading to the co-creation of several collaborative outputs and impact case studies.
Academic background
Jessica is the author of Rethinking Media Development Through Evaluation: Beyond Freedom (published by Palgrave Macmillan); the editor of Evaluating Communication for Development: An Evaluation Framework in Action (published by Practical Action Publishing); and the co-editor of Communication in International Development: Looking Good or Doing Good (published by Routledge). Her forthcoming book, to be published by Routledge, is Communication and Development in a Capitalist World: Unmaking and Remaking Sustainability.
Jessica completed her PhD in the Institute for Creative Industries (School of Journalism, Media, and Entertainment) at the Queensland University of Technology in 2014. She then worked at RMIT University as a Postdoctoral Researcher, and then at the University of Leicester as a lecturer in the School of Media Communication and Sociology.
Research
Current research and collaborations
- Principal Investigator: Un/Making CSC: A Critical Engagement with Communication for Social Changemaking (AHRC Early Career Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship, Grant No. AH/W009242/1)
- Co-Principal Investigator: Para Sport Against Stigma project (AT2030 Project, Global Disability Innovation Hub, FCDO-funded)
Current and past research supervisions
Completed Supervisions:
- Dr Happy Singu-Hansen – Gender, People-Centred Social Innovation and Youth Media Work in Tanzania
- Dr Olga Yegorova – Living with pelvic organ prolapse: A decolonial communications exploration in Ethiopia
- Dr Flavio Garcia da Rocha – When the Internet absorbs television: Audience practices and social change in Brazil
- Dr Sahika Erkonan – Present encounters with the past: An ethnographic inquiry into the London Armenian diaspora
Current Supervisions:
- Bethany Boeun Hong – Undesigning Disability Stigma: Ontological Design and Disability Mapping
Eliana Rosas-Aguilar (AHRC Techne) – Tackling disability stigma through emotional narratives in Peru (Due 2026) - Jessie Akambadi (AHRC Techne) – They Still Call it Africa: Corruption, theatre archives, and participatory filmmaking (Starting 2025)
- Vitoria Croda – Data colonialism in humanitarian aid and Global South resistance (Starting 2025)
She is interested in supervising students in the broad areas of communication, development and social change; civil society and activism; issues of funding and power in development and social change; digital justice including the platformisation of social change; disability sport and communication in Africa; participatory, creative and arts based methodologies.
Interests and activities
Dr Jessica Noske-Turner is the Co-Lead of Loughborough University London’s Communication & Social Change Research Hub, and Co-Chair of the Participatory Communication Research Section of the International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR).