Josepha Wessels
- Senior Lecturer
- josepha.wessels@mau.se
Josepha (Joshka) Wessels is a Senior Lecturer in Communication for Development at the School of Arts and Communication (K3), Faculty of Culture and Society. She teaches for the MA degree course on Communication for Development (ComDev) and is currently carrying out two Swedish Research Council-funded research projects on 1) Resilience in Urban Sudan and 2) Syrian Refugees in Jordan, Turkey and Sweden. She is in the final stages of an ethnographic film project, with support from the Crafoord Foundation, documenting life histories of Syrian refugees over a period of 20 years. In 2019, she published a landmark book on the history of Syrian Documentary cinema and video activism with IB Tauris/Bloomsbury UK.
She has a MA in Visual Ethnography from Leiden University (1996) and a PhD in Human Geography/Development Studies from the University of Amsterdam (2008) and has carried out postdoctoral research at Lund University on and the University of Copenhagen between 2011 and 2016. Besides her academic career, she has run her own environmental documentary production company for over 10 years between 2002 and 2012 producing over 10 broadcast films for the Earth Report Series at BBC World and Al Jazeera English and several filmed commissioned by internationals NGOs, UN organisations and the EU.
Her work has been published in The Conversation, Open Democracy, the Middle East Institute, the Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research, Cyber Orient – Online Journal of the Virtual
Middle East and Islamic World, the Middle-East Journal of Culture & Communication, Middle-East Critique, Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, Hydrological Sciences Journal, and the International Journal of Environmental Studies.
ORCID: 0000-0003-2682-035X