New Postdoctoral Researcher Azza El-Masri

Azza's dissertation — Caught in the Algorithm's Net: Platform Governance, Dissident Journalism, and the Making of Encrypted Publics (2026) — developed an ethnographic account of how dissident digital newsrooms in Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq navigate infrastructural imperialism under conditions of political violence, authoritarianism and occupation. Her work argues that platform governance does not operate from the outside but seeps inward, constituting an epistemic regime that reorganizes journalistic labor and public address at their core.

She joins the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at UCPH as a postdoctoral researcher on Dr. Nina Grønlykke Mollerup's ERC Consolidator Grant Before the Image to extend her research to the moment before publication. Primarily, she will be examining how surveillance risk shapes the very act of image-making among conflict image producers in the Arab world. Her work sits at the intersection of platform studies, journalism, and critical infrastructure theory, and has appeared in Information, Communication & Society, New Media & Society, and the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, among other venues. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a journalist and fact-checker at a Lebanese dissident newsroom and as a program associate at media-tech non-profit Meedan, where she built pan-Arab media literacy initiatives and led large-scale open-source archiving efforts

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