Shawn Powers is an Assistant Professor at Georgia State University’s Department of Communication where he works closely with the Center on International Media Education. He has previously been a Visiting Assistant Professor at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism London Program and a Visiting Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He earned his Ph.D. from USC Annenberg in 2009 where he studied and wrote about the geopolitical uses of news and information by international actors. Shawn’s research interests include mass media and society, new and social media technologies, diasporic communities, globalization and traditional and public diplomacy. He has conducted field research in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern and Western Europe and North America.
Shawn’s work has been published in several journals, including: Media, War & Conflict, Global Media & Communication, Ethnopolitics and Media Development. In 2007, Shawn was the co-recipient of a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to study global news broadcasters and in 2008 Shawn helped design and managed CPD’s evaluation of Alhurra, the US-supported international broadcaster in the Middle East. His current projects include revising his dissertation into a book on how the Al Jazeera Network has helped Qatar transition from a “micro-state” to an influential “network-state,” a comparative analysis of how different international broadcasters report news of China, and a case study of exemplar uses of social media for development and good governance in Asia and the Middle East.