Dani Madrid-Morales
Lecturer in Journalism and Global Communication, The University of Sheffield

I'm a scholar of global media and communication with a background in broadcast journalism and East Asian studies currently working as Lecturer in Journalism and Global Communication at the Department of Journalism Studies, The University of Sheffield. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor at the University of Houston and a PhD Fellow at City University of Hong Kong. Before entering academia, I worked for a decade as scriptwriter and news editor at Televisió de Catalunya, and I taught at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC).

I study global political communication with an emphasis on State-sponsored news, disinformation and foreign public opinion. My work often crosses over disciplines including media and area studies, international politics, digital humanities and computational social sciences. Geographically, I focus on communication processes in East Asia, where I lived for several years, and Sub-Saharan Africa, which is at the centre of my current research program. I work with qualitative and quantitative methods: from in-depth interviews to online experiments, and from computational text analysis to newsroom ethnography.


Most recent updates:

× 3 Dec, 2024: Spoke at the Near East Institute's Global Security Seminar Series about Russian and Chinese strategic disinformation narratives. The recording of my talk is available here.
× 4 Jun, 2024: A new review of my co-edited book (with Herman Wasserman) Disinformation in the Global South has been published in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media.
× 27 Mar, 2024: We just released the "Global English-language Corpus of Humanitarian News". The corpus includes data from over 1 million news articles and can be downloaded for free. Here is a description of the project for which data was collected.
× 26 Oct, 2023: Happy to have been invited for the third time to speak with Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden of The China in Africa Podcast. On this edition of the podcast, we talked about the changing nature of the CCP's mediated engagement with Africa, Latin America and beyond.
× 28 Sep, 2023: Casa África invited me to present my work on foreign information manipulation and interference in Africa to members of the diplomatic corps in Madrid. The slides from a closed-door presentation can be downloaded from here, while a recording of session open to the general public is on YouTube.
× 25 Sep, 2023: Participated in an OpenAI-led red teaming effort to assess the risks and safety profile of OpenAI models and systems. The system card with some of my recommendations is available here.
× 18 Aug, 2023: For the fifth summer in a row, I taught Quantitative Text Analysis at the IPSA-NUS Methods School in Singapore. This was the first time the course was offered in person after COVID-19. I've uploaded all the materials from the online version of the course here.
× 7 Aug, 2023: I spoke to the online magazine The Wire China about the role of StarTimes in Africa's digital TV landscape. The news story (paywalled) is available here. Other news stories about StarTimes that I have contributed to can be accessed here.
× 7 Aug, 2023: A new publication from the African Digital News Corpus (ADNc) project has been published in the open access journal, Media and Communication. The paper, titled "A Computational Mapping of Online News Deserts on African News Websites" is available here.
× 17 Jul, 2023: Two years ago, Herman Wasserman and I began a partnership with Africa Check to develop new training materials to teach misinformation literacy skills to South African highschoolers. The first fruits of this cooperation are now coming to light.
× 22 Jun, 2023: The School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University hosted the second African Digital Media Research Methods Symposium (DigiMethods 2023), where I delivered a series of workshops on using computational tools to study African digital media. The slides and materials are available here.
× 13 Jun, 2023: I was invited to present the African Digital News corpus at Bournemouth University's Department of Media and Communication's Research Process Seminar series. The slides from my talk can be downloaded from here.
× 29 May, 2023: At the ICA 2023 conference, the poster I co-presented with Melissa Tully and Frankline Matanji received a "Top Poster Award". In this poster, we discuss preliminary findings of a project on "scams as everyday misinformation".
× 24 April, 2023: The Department of Communication at Universidad Carlos III in Madrid hosted me for a week as part of the Erasmus+ teaching mobility programme. I delivered lectures on Text as Data for Data Journalists (slides) and Reporting in East Asia (slides). I also took part in a research seminar on.
× 14 April, 2023: The New York Times published a story about pro-Russian narratives on African news outlets, which features some of my most recent work on how Chinese media are a vehicle for Russian disinformation. The paywalled article is here.
× 30 March, 2023: I attended a workshop on "Hate and Disinformation on WhatsApp: Global Perspectives" at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, co-organized with LMU University. At the event, I presented my latest research with Herman Wasserman on political disinformation in South Africa. The slides are here.
× 16 March, 2023: I was invited to present my work on the geopolitics of disinformation at a the “Information at the speed of trust: (dis/ill/mis) information and security issues” conference organised by the Network for Strategic Analysis in Canada. The slides from my talk are available here.
× 10 March, 2023: Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly has just published a review by Trust Matsilele of Disinformation in the Global South, my last co-authored book with Herman Wasserman.
× 12 February, 2023: I spoke to El País about the presence of Chinese media in Kenya, and about my research about StarTimes' 10,000 villages project. A story (in Spanish) featuring some of my ongoing research on the topic has just been published.
× 7 February, 2023: A review of the book Disinformation in the Global South that I co-edited with Herman Wasserman has just been posted on the website of The International Journal of Press/Politics.
× 1 February, 2023: A newspaper article about China's media footfrint in Africa in La Razón fetures some of my thoughts on the influence of Chinese pay TV operator StarTimes. The article is available (in Spanish) here.
× 28 January, 2023: International Communication Gazette just published a Special Issue titled "A Decade of China's Media Going Global: Issues and Perspectives" that I co-edited with Viv Marsh (Westerminster U) and Chris Paterson (U of Leeds). Our Introduction can be read for free.
× 12 January, 2023: I spoke about the "Geopolitics of Disinformation in Africa" at Casa África. A recording of my talk is available on YouTube. I also spoked about the contents of the talk with RNE and La Provincia.

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