Sujatha Sosale is interested in the capacity-building, facilitating, and empowering roles of media and communication in processes of development and social change. Within this domain, she studies media technologies, journalism education in contexts of development and the global South, and globalization and the news. She is also interested in exploring the potential for dialogue and participation in spaces as wide-ranging as supranational policy-making bodies and community-level media and communication efforts. Her emerging geographical foci for research include countries with a history of Anglophone and Francophone colonization in the Indian Ocean Rim, encompassing a range of entities from advanced developing economies to Small Island Developing States.
She is author of Communication, Development, and Democracy: Mapping a Discourse (Hampton Press, 2008) and co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of International Communication on international crises and the media (2009). Her latest article on the knowledge economy and new media in India is in press with the Journal of International Communication. Other articles have appeared in journals such as International Communication Gazette, Journalism and Communication Monographs, the Journal of International Communication; Journalism: theory, practice and criticism; and the International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics. She has also contributed chapters to edited collections.
She has served on the advisory board of the Journal of Communication Inquiry, and was recently invited to serve on the advisory board of the Journal of International Communication.
Prior to coming to the United States, she lived in Bangalore, India, where she worked as a copywriter in media industries, writing for a variety of media, for commercial as well as public service campaigns, and as a freelance journalist for regional and local dailies and weeklies. Before joining the UI, she was on the communication faculty at Georgia State University. She teaches courses in media and international development, research methods, and globalization and the news.
Professional association memberships include the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), where she is Head of the International Communication Section. She is a member of the Asian Media and Information Centre (AMIC), and the International Communication Association (ICA). She also holds intermittent membership with the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).