Five students have been selected as Lender Center for Social Justice student fellows and will work on a research project that examines American news media coverage and United States policymaking related to the war on terror.
The group will work with Nausheen Husain, assistant professor of magazine, news and digital journalism (MND) in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, who last spring was named Lender Center faculty fellow for 2023-25.
Student fellows will conduct research, analyze data and present findings related to how American media coverage of the war on terror affected U.S. policymaking and later impacted Muslim individuals and communities. They will also learn oral history methods to conduct trauma-informed interviews with individuals and in communities affected by war-on-terror policies; examine resistance projects and movements contributing to U.S. policymaking; and collaborate with Husain’s research partner, Nicole Nguyen, associate professor of criminality, law and justice at the University of Illinois – Chicago College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, to publish findings.
Kendall Phillips, Lender Center interim director, announced the following as 2023-25 student fellows:
Mohammad Ebad Athar
Mohammad Ebad Athar
Athar is a Ph.D. candidate in history and a graduate research associate in the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs South Asia Center in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
Athar’s dissertation examines the global impact of the post-9/11 period for the South Asian diaspora in the United States and the Persian Gulf. In drawing connections between those regions, Athar hopes to illustrate how South Asian identity has been securitized across transnational borders and how South Asian political activism has resisted that framework.
Olivia Boyer
Olivia Boyer
Boyer is a second-year MND major in the Newhouse School with a minor in South Asian studies in A&S.
Boyer has been involved in several on-campus publications, including The Daily Orange and University Girl. She has served since January as a research assistant for Husain, analyzing news media coverage of the war on terror and its impact. The Akron, Ohio, native’s interests include civic engagement, social justice, storytelling and fashion.
Azadeh Ghanizadeh
Azadeh Ghanizadeh
Ghanizadeh is a Ph.D. candidate in writing studies, rhetoric and composition in A&S. Her dissertation focuses on media representations of refugees in the United States through film, public service announcements and United Nations celebrity endorsements. Her work challenges prevailing assumptions about multiculturalism and migration by examining how American media portray forced migration and how those portrayals affect public policy.
Ghanizadeh holds degrees from the University of Oregon and Oregon State University. She has taught courses in critical thinking and composition, introductory and intermediate college writing and Middle East studies at Oregon State, Syracuse and Colgate Universities.
Mary Hanrahan
Mary Hanrahan
Hanrahan is a communication and rhetorical studies master’s student in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. She researches how structures of power are articulated through cultural texts and how texts mutate, enforce or disrupt systems of privilege and oppression.
She is interested in narrative reclamation and communications from communities experiencing surveillance and containment. She also investigates Islamophobic biases in the news media, their impact on marginalized groups and how affected communities work around the consequences of those biases.
Tia Poquette
Tia Poquette
Poquette is a third-year policy studies major in the Maxwell School and College of Arts and Sciences with double minors in architecture in the School of Architecture and sociology in the Maxwell School. Poquette is interested in urban policy, sustainability, social justice and criminal justice. She has interned with the nonprofit Hudson Yards Hell’s Kitchen Alliance and Youth Public History Institute. Her work there focused on community building and the history of prisons and policing, as well as their contemporary connections. She serves as a teaching assistant for Introduction to Public Policy Analysis.
Lender Center student fellows work on projects for two years, receive a $2,000 fellowship and will present their work at the 2025 Lender Symposium.
The Lender Center will soon issue a call for proposals for faculty fellowships for the 2024-26 term, according to Phillips. The announcement is timed for early December, and the expected deadline for applications to be submitted is April 18, 2024. Established in 2018, the Lender Center for Social Justice hosts research projects, activities and programming, including multidisciplinary conversations related to issues of social justice and collaborations with other University units, to promote a robust dialogue about issues of justice, equity and inclusion.
