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Biography

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Dr. Yael Warshel is is an award winning scholar, professor, and public service professional.

She is President of Invisible Light: Realizing Conflict Zone Children's Rights, a

Visiting Scholar with the UCLA Center for the  Study of International Migration,

Vice President of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (the Northwest

African studies association), President Elect of the Association of Middle East

Children and Youth Studies, and a Stanford University-UC Berkeley John Gardner

Public Service Fellow. Dr. Warshel led a Rock Ethics Institute initiative about

Children, Youth, and Media in International and Global Conflict Zones; and co-led

a second about Human Rights and Forced-Migration. As part of the former,
she is the Founding Director of the Children, Media and Conflict Zones Lab. 

Dr. Warshel works at the intersection between international media, child, and conflict analysis,

practice and policy, specializing in the concept of “peace communication” she pioneered.

She critically consults international media practitioners and policy makers about the efficacy

of using media to make peace, and has been cited by a broad range of media sources. Dr. Warshel is

fluent in and/or has studied five languages and conducted fieldwork in the Middle East, North and Sub-Saharan Africa,

the Balkans, and Latin America. You can read about some of her work in an interview conducted by the International Communication Association.

Dr. Warshel's ongoing field-based articles and book projects explore global human rights to communication and education, and (non-state) citizenship rights of stateless and forcibly-migrated and –sedentarized conflict zones implicated populations. She explores these matters through her interpretations of Northwest African youth's global uses of digital media.

Dr. Warshel is completing her third book, When Conflict Is Real: Reimagining the Study of Children, Youth and Media in International and Global Conflict Zones, under contract with Stanford University Press. This book will promote a critical turn and offer practitioners recommendations for bridging the disconnect between the population forming the largest demographic in conflict zones (children and youth), and the communication rights and media technologies made available to them to cope and become empowered to mediate political conflicts nonviolently.

Dr. Warshel is the author of Experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Children, Peace Communication and Socialization from Cambridge University Press (2021). This peer-reviewed book critically determined the efficacy of peace communication interventions in managing political conflicts, tracing the socialization of Palestinian and Israeli children amid conflict zones at a granular level. The single-authored monograph used as its case for analysis Dr. Warshel's multi-year mixed-method audience reception study of peacebuilding versions of Israeli and Palestinian Sesame Street. The summary TEDx Talk about this rigorous 500 page book, critically acclaimed as "a tour de-force," is available here.

For Experiencing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Dr. Warshel won the 2022 National Communication Association's Sue DeWine Distinguished Scholarly Book Award for significant contributions to applied communication research and theory, the 2023 National Communication Association Top Book of the Year Award in Ethics, the 2023 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Honorable Mention in Activism, Communication and Social Justice, the 2024 International Studies Association Book Award Runner-up in International Communication, and the 2024 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist for Current Events.

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Dr. Warshel is co-editor with Elihu Katz of the political communication book, Election Studies: What’s Their Use? (2001, 2018). The book examined a cross-national study of campaigns and media effects in their underpinning of the utility of the study of elections for scientific knowledge.

Among other venues, Dr. Warshel’s scholarship has been published in leading peer-review journals, including the Journal of Global Ethics, African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review, Journal of Communication, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, NEOS: A Publication of the American Anthropology Association Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group, Arab Media and Society, and Journal of North African Studies.

Dr. Warshel was also the recipient of three top dissertation awards for her research about peace communication, including one in Peace Studies and two in global and international communication from the International and National Communication Associations. She has also earned several more awards in public service, African and Middle Eastern studies (in both Palestine and Israel studies), and in communication.

Previously Dr. Warshel coordinated communication policy for UNESCO, worked as a photojournalist with the Zimbabwe‐Inter‐Africa‐News‐Agency, and conducted policy‐relevant research with the Center for International Development and Conflict Management, the Jerusalem‐based Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, Center for Middle East Development, and Center for Research on Peace Education.

Dr. Warshel taught at UCLA, UCSD,  Penn State as an Assistant Professor of Telecommunications and Media Industries, African Studies, Ethics, International Affairs, Education, Information Sciences and Technology, Artificial Intelligence studies, and Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, and at American University as an assistant professor of international communication and associate faculty of international peace, conflict resolution and development. As a professor, Dr. Warshel received two awards from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication for her pedagogical innovations teaching graduate and undergraduate students.

Education:

Dr. Warshel earned her Ph.D. in communication from UC San Diego, an M.A. in communication from the Annenberg School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a bachelor's in interdisciplinary studies from UC Berkeley, which she combined with a photography major at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

Areas of Expertise:

Comparative and Global African, Middle Eastern, and Saharan Media (including Systems, Ethics, Practices, Uses, Reception, Effects and Contexts)

Peace Communication and Social Change

Children and Ethnopolitical Conflict

Ethnography of Violence

Public Opinion

Citizenship/Human Rights

Borderlands and (Forced-) Migration

Social-Psychology and Intergroup Communication

Assessment and Evaluation

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