Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin earns 2023 Nafziger-White-Salwen Dissertation Award

University of Michigan School of Information assistant professor Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin has earned a 2023 Nafziger-White-Salwen Dissertation Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. 

The award recognizes excellence in Ph.D. dissertation research that demonstrates potentially significant impact and importance in the field of journalism and communication research.

“I am so incredibly honored to receive this award,” Peterson-Salahuddin says. “This was an ambitious project of academic passion, and I am so thrilled and validated by the value the Nafziger-White-Salwen awards committee sees in this work, which I hope to continue and develop over the coming years.” 

Peterson-Salahuddin's research focuses on the culturally specific ways marginalized communities – most often Black women, femmes and queer folks – engage with mass and digital communications technologies to seek information, produce knowledge and build community. Her research also examines the way the infrastructure of these technologies helps these communities to overcome or continue to replicate systemic barriers to equity.

Peterson-Salahuddin's dissertation is titled “Black Feminism in Popular Culture: Exploring Representations of Black Feminism in News & Entertainment Media." The project explores popular usages of Black feminist ideas, terms and aesthetics in spaces of popular culture, specifically journalism and entertainment media.

Black Feminist theory, Peterson-Salahuddin explains, is a line of intellectual thought historically produced from Black women's unique lived experiences.

“Increasingly, concepts and expressions derived from Black feminist theory, such as ‘intersectionality,’ have been translated to mass audiences through popular media such as news, television and music to much scrutiny and debate,” Peterson-Salahuddin says. 

“While these popular usages can expose mass audiences to the lived realities of Black women, femme, and queer folks in productive ways for thinking about liberation, the neoliberal, individualist impulses of popular media markets often demand a shift in the structural analysis of marginalization that Black feminism intends to offer, leading to problematic moments of misunderstandings and misuse.” 

Peterson-Salahuddin joined UMSI in 2022 to build upon her research and work as a presidential postdoctoral fellow and assistant professor. Before joining UMSI, Peterson-Salahuddin was pursuing a media, technology and society PhD at Northwestern University. She obtained her PhD in 2022. 

At UMSI, she is currently working on a project looking at how Black women and femme individuals in Southeast Michigan use digital intermediaries –  specifically social media platforms, search engines and digital messenger services – to find social and political information. 

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Learn more about Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin by visiting her UMSI faculty profile or reading UMSI’s interview with her.