Biography
Dr. Yael Warshel is President of Invisible Light: Realizing Conflict Zone Children's Rights.
She is a Visiting Scholar with the University of California at Los Angeles Center for the
Study of International Migration. She leads a Rock Ethics initiative about Children, Youth,
and Media in International and Global Conflict Zones; and co-leads 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. She is also an assistant
professor of telecommunications and media industries, and African studies, Rock Ethics
Institute research associate, and affiliated faculty of Middle Eastern studies,
international affairs, international and comparative education, information
sciences and technology, Islamic studies, and the center for socially
responsible artificial intelligence at Penn State.
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. 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. Her current 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 President Elect of the Association of Middle East Children and Youth Studies,
Vice President of the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, the Northwest African studies association, and a Stanford University-UC Berkeley John Gardner Public Service Fellow. 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.
An award-winning scholar, Dr. Warshel is the author of Experiencing the Israeli Palestinian Conflict: Children, Peace Communication and Socialization, from Cambridge University Press (2021). For the book, she won the
2024 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist for Current Events, the 2024 International Studies Association Book Award Runner-up in International Communication, 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, and the 2022 National Communication Association's Sue DeWine Distinguished Scholarly Book Award for significant contributions to applied communication theory and research. The book critically determines the efficacy of peace communication interventions in managing political conflicts, using as its case her multi-year reception study of peacebuilding versions of Israeli and Palestinian Sesame Street. Dr. Warshel’s summary TEDx talk about it is available here.
She is also co-editor with Elihu Katz of the political communication book, Election Studies: What’s Their Use? (2001, 2018); is working on a 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; and researches the comparative determinants of international coverage of conflicts, per the contrast between frames and agendas set, and numbers and magnitude of conflicts. You can read about some of that in an interview conducted with her by the International Communication Association. Dr. Warshel is 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 communication, African, and Middle Eastern studies (in both Palestine and Israel studies), including two teaching awards from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
Among other venues, Dr. Warshel’s scholarship has also been published in 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. Before joining Penn State, Dr. Warshel taught at UCLA, UCSD, and American University as an assistant professor of international communication and associate faculty of international peace and conflict resolution. She 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 Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, the Center for Middle East Development, and the Center for Research on Peace Education.
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 from 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