Associate Professor

E: aalrawi@sfu.ca
Room: K8645

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I am an Associate Professor of News, Social Media, and Public Communication at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Since 2019, I have been the Director of the Disinformation Project whose findings and insights were featured in different outlets nationally and internationally.

Currently, I am running two SSHRC-funded projects. The first one is "Mediated Racism and Democracy" which focuses on investigating the issues of racism and democracy in news and social media content as well as from the perspective of racialized Canadian politicians and journalists, partly to understand whether racism negatively influences democracy. The second project examines the framing of the opioid crisis in Canada with a focus on the news coverage and social media posts, and how blame is predominantly assigned in each medium. 

I began my full-time media career in 2002 by serving as a Communication Officer and later a Spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Iraq. My work revolved around communicating about the humanitarian situation in Iraq.

Between 2002 and 2006, I wrote several investigative reports for the ICRC about the victims of war in Iraq in both Arabic and English languages. I also worked as a freelance radio journalist for a couple of US-based radio stations, and one of my 2003 radio reports on prisoners' abuse was nominated for a US national award in 2004. 

In 2006, I started my full-time academic career by teaching in the Sultanate of Oman. Soon after that, I began studying for my second Ph.D. study in media and communication research at Leicester University in the UK. Overall, I taught at several colleges and universities in 5 countries including serving as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Media & Communication at Erasmus University in the Netherlands (2011-2014) during which I won a few teaching awards. I served later as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Canada (2015-2018). 

In terms of peer reviewed publications, I published 10+ academic books, 100+ academic research papers, 2 co-edited books, and 25+ book chapters. I also delivered presentations, lectures, and talks in over 100 events nationally and internationally, and I advised and offered expert consultancy and feedback to numerous NGOs, humanitarian and civic groups, the UN, non-profit organizations, and governmental bodies such as the Public Order Emergency Commission and Elections BC. I was also invited as an expert witness at the Canadian Senate and twice at the House of Commons. 

As for academic service, I currently serve in the editorial board of more than half a dozen academic journals including  Journal of Popular Culture since 2009, Communication Studies, and Digital Journalism. I also blind reviewed over 200 research papers submitted to more than 100 different academic journals.

At SFU, I successfully received research funding from 19 projects serving as a collaborator, co-applicant and pricicpal applicant, and I worked with more than 40 research assistants to collaboratively produce research papers, reports, and a few books. The funds that I have brought to the School of Communication as a principal and co-applicant are over $1.2 million, and the funders include SSHRC, CIHR, the Department of Heritage's Digital Citizen Contribution Program, Mitacs, British Columbia’s Office of the Human Rights Commissioner, and various SFU's internal grants.

• 2008-2012 - Ph.D., Media & Communication Studies, University of Leicester, UK. The thesis is entitled “TV coverage of the 2010 elections in Iraq: A study of the evening newscasts of four Iraqi satellite channels”.
• 1999-2004 – Ph.D., English Literature, College of Arts, Baghdad University, Iraq. The thesis is entitled “The Arab image in twentieth century English popular fiction”.
• 1997-1999 - M.A., English Literature, College of Arts, Baghdad University, Iraq. The thesis is entitled “Aldous Huxley as a satirist: A study of a selection of his novels”. 
• 1994-1997 - B.A., English Language & Literature, Al-Ma’mon University College, Baghdad, Iraq (Cum Laude & winner of a 1997 national award in the field of 'English Language & Literature'). 

Social media, News, Computational journalism, Popular culture, International communication, Disinformation, Digital methods.