Dr Dani Madrid-Morales (he/him)
BA, MA (Autònoma Barcelona); MA (FU Berlin); PhD (CityU Hong Kong)
School of Journalism, Media and Communication
Lecturer in Journalism and Global Communication
Postgraduate Research Director
+44 114 222 2508
Full contact details
School of Journalism, Media and Communication
The Wave
2 Whitham Road
Sheffield
S10 2AH
- Profile
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Dani joined the school in April 2022 as Lecturer in Journalism & Global Communication. Prior to joining The University of Sheffield, he was an Assistant Professor in Journalism at the Valenti School of Communication, University of Houston (2018-2022), and a Hong Kong PhD Fellow in the Department of Media and Communication at City University of Hong Kong (2013-2018).
Before starting his academic career, Dani worked as a journalist for 15 years in his hometown, Barcelona. He first reported on sports for local radio stations and news websites, and then joined the newsroom of Televisió de Catalunya (TV3), where he worked as producer and news editor, covering foreign affairs.
Dani is an active member of the International Communication Association’s Global Communication and Social Change Division, where he served as Secretary from 2020 to 2022. He is also a member of the editorial board of the academic journal, African Journalism Studies and the Annals of the International Communication Association.
At the School of Journalism, Media and Communication, Dani also serves as Director of Postgraduate Research, and is the Co-Lead of the Disinformation Research Cluster.
- Research interests
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Dani's research is centred around the study of global political communication and international media flows, with a focus on the Global South. He has published extensively on the impact of global Chinese media on local journalistic cultures in English and French speaking Africa and studied the multiple ways audiences in East and Southern Africa engage with news and entertainment on Chinese media. His work on this area has been discussed in some of the world’s leading news organisations including BBC World Service, CNN International, The Economist, Yomiuri Shimbun, and Los Angeles Times.
More recently, Dani has been interested in studying the geopolitics of disinformation in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly from an audience perspective. His latest book on this topic, co-edited with Herman Wasserman, is Disinformation in the Global South (Wiley). Dani also helps curate disinfoafrica.org, a website that brings together research on mis/disinformation in Africa. In the area of disinformation studies, he is currently focusing on the different ways media users engage with disinformation online, and how disinformation produced by foreign actors influences public opinion in Sub-Saharan Africa.
In his research, Dani employs a wide range of methodological approaches. He is actively involved in exploring how the use of computational methods can help researchers gain insights from media texts, particularly in the Global South. As part of these efforts, Dani is working on the development of a live corpus of digital news that includes hundreds of media organizations in three dozen African countries. Researchers interested in using content from the database can explore this freely available dataset and contact Dani for more details.
- Publications
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Books
- Comunicación y poder en Asia oriental. Barcelona: Editorial UOC.
Edited books
- Disinformation in the Global South. Wiley.
Journal articles
- Global Chinese media and a decade of change. International Communication Gazette, 85(1), 3-14.
- ¿Se acumula capital social en Asia Oriental con el uso de las redes sociales? Inferencia causal estadística con datos del Asian Barometer Survey. Revista Internacional de Sociología, 80(4).
- How effective are Chinese media in shaping audiences’ attitudes towards China? A survey analysis in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. Online Media and Global Communication, 0(0).
- Online political engagement, cognitive skills and engagement with misinformation: evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa and the United States. Online Information Review.
- Social media, misinformation, and age inequality in online political engagement. Journal of Information Technology & Politics. View this article in WRRO
- Who is Responsible for Stopping the Spread of Misinformation? Examining Audience Perceptions of Responsibilities and Responses in Six Sub-Saharan African Countries. Digital Journalism, 10(5), 679-697.
- Who set the narrative? Assessing the influence of Chinese global media on news coverage of COVID-19 in 30 African countries. Global Media and China, 6(2), 129-151.
- Why are Politically Active People Avoided in Countries with Collectivistic Culture? A Cross-Cultural Experiment. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 52(4), 388-405.
- Disruptions and transformations of digital media in Africa: An interdisciplinary overview. Journal of African Media Studies, 13(1), 3-16.
- Motivations for Sharing Misinformation: A Comparative Study in Six Sub-Saharan African Countries. International Journal of Communication, 15, 1200-1219.
- Is it still a man’s world? Social media news use and gender inequality in online political engagement. Information, Communication & Society, 24(3), 381-399.
- Using Computational Text Analysis Tools to Study African Online News Content. African Journalism Studies, 41(4), 68-82.
- Diversifying Voice, Democratizing the News? A Content Analysis of Citizen News Sources in Spanish-language International Broadcasting. Journalism Studies, 21(8), 1076-1092.
- Economic Downturns and Hardline Public Opinion. Social Science Quarterly, 101(1), 309-324.
- An Exploratory Study of “Fake News” and Media Trust in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. African Journalism Studies, 40(1), 107-123.
- Narratives of Contemporary Africa on China Global Television Network’s Documentary Series Faces of Africa. Journal of Asian and African Studies, 53(6), 917-931.
- How Influential Are Chinese Media in Africa? An Audience Analysis in Kenya and South Africa. International Journal of Communication, 12, 2212-2231.
- Chinese Media Engagement in South Africa. Journalism Studies, 19(8), 1218-1235.
- Identity and pleasure: the politics of Indonesian screen culture. Asian Journal of Communication, 26(2), 197-199.
- ‘Transatlantic connection’: K-pop and K-drama fandom in Spain and Latin America. The Journal of Fandom Studies, 3(1), 23-41.
- The geopolitics of disinformation: worldviews, media consumption and the adoption of global strategic disinformation narratives. International Journal of Public Opinion Research.
- A Computational Mapping of Online News Deserts on African News Websites. Media and Communication, 11(3).
- China y medios de comunicación. La internacionalización de los medios de comunicación chinos: un estudio de la producción periodística en CGTN AFRICA. Communication Papers, 6(11), 51-51.
Chapters
- The Messenger, the Message, and the Receiver: South African Government Communication During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication (pp. 319-333). Springer International Publishing
- Research Methods in Comparative Disinformation Studies (pp. 41-57). Wiley
- Conclusion (pp. 210-220). Wiley
- Soft power in the living room, Screening China's Soft Power (pp. 38-55). Routledge
- China's digital public diplomacy towards Africa: Actors, messages and audiences, China-Africa Relations: Building Images through Cultural Cooperation, Media Representation and Communication (pp. 129-146).
- Why Are Chinese Media in Africa? Evidence from Three Decades of Xinhua’s News Coverage of Africa, China’s Media and Soft Power in Africa (pp. 79-92). Palgrave Macmillan US
- Comunicación y poder en Asia oriental. Barcelona: Editorial UOC.
- Teaching activities
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Dani’s teaches modules in global journalism and global communication, research methods and data journalism.
He is module leader for JNL61005 Research Portfolio in the MA Global Journalism course, where he supervises student dissertations too, and for JNL6027 Journalism, Globalisation and Technology.
- PhD Supervision
Dani is interested in supervising doctoral students in the following areas:
- China-Africa media relations
- Disinformation in Sub-Saharan Africa
- Global public opinion
- Audiences and global media flows
- Computational approaches to the study news
Currently, Dani is supervising the following students:- Anran Ju, China's Digital Public Diplomacy towards UK and Turkey
- Hongqin Cheng, Populism in Online Electoral Campaigning in Taiwan
- Xiao Cheng, Audiences and Data Journalism in China
- Wisnu P. Utomo, Digital Transformations and Hybridisation in Indonesian Journalism