Doctoral candidate in Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication Elisabetta Ferrari has received a grant from Villanova University’s Waterhouse Family Institute for the Study of Communication and Society (WFI) to study how contemporary social movements construct discourses about technology and social change. WFI explores the ethical dimensions of communication and its role in creating social change through cutting-edge research and student programs as well as the hands-on involvement of communication scholars and professionals from around the globe.

Ms. Ferrari’s dissertation project, “The Technological Imaginaries of Social Movements: The Discursive Dimension of Communication Technology and the Fight for Social Change,” examines digital media activism with a focus on how activists construct shared visions of the role that communication technologies can play in their struggle for social change and how these visions have an impact on their political practices. Through this project, Ms. Ferrari’s goal is to develop an empirically grounded, theoretical framework to account for the multifaceted relationship between communication technologies and activism in different countries.