Josepha Wessels
Associate Professor/Senior lecturer

Presentation

Joshka Wessels is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and Associate Professor in Media and Communication Studies with a background in Visual Anthropology and Human Geography at the School of Arts and Communication (K3). She teaches Communication for Development (ComDev).

Her interests are in immersive technologies, participatory approaches, communication and media for social change, citizen media and social movements. She has expertise in migration and integration, peace and conflict, environmental issues and extensive fieldwork experience in the South West Asia and North Africa Region (SWANA). Next to TV broadcast documentaries, she also produced and directed award-winning cine-VR 360 video experiences. She is keen on further exploring the co-creative use of video and immersive media in social scientific research and combining her scholarly and media production skills in innovative methods.

She is currently the PI of several research projects funded by the Swedish research council on Sudan on Climate Change Resilience and the role of graffiti and environmentalism in social change. Furthermore, she is involved in a national research environment on Syrian refugees in Jordan, Turkey and Sweden in collaboration with Gothenburg University and a project funded by the Riksbanken Jubileum fund on the Arabic-speaking cultural production and academic fields in post-migrant Sweden led by Professor Maja Povrzanovic Frykman at the Malmö Institute for studies of Migration, Diversity and Welfare (MIM).

She is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Syrian Studies at the University of Saint Andrews, UK. In 2019, she published a landmark book "Documenting Syria: Film-making, Video Activism and Revolution" with IB Tauris/Bloomsbury UK.