RESEARCHER. PROFESSOR. JOURNALIST AT HEART. WANDERER.
SUMMER HARLOW
ABOUT ME
I'm a newspaper reporter-turned journalism professor currently at the University of Texas at Austin's Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. Previously I was an associate professor in the Jack J. Valenti School of Communication at the University of Houston and an assistant professor of social media at Florida State University's College of Communication & Information.
I earned my Ph.D. in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin (UT). While conducting my dissertation research I was an Inter American Foundation Grassroots Development Fellow based in El Salvador. I also have a Master's Degree in Latin American Studies from UT, as well as a Bachelor's of Journalism and a B.A. in Spanish from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
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Before becoming a professor, I spent about a decade as a reporter covering immigration and city government at newspapers in the U.S., and I also worked as a freelance reporter in Guatemala and El Salvador. From 2008-2009 I was an Inter-American Press Association Fellow based in Guatemala.
While in Guatemala in 2009, I saw first-hand the power of social media for mobilizing protest, and thus was born my research trajectory exploring the intersections of social media, civic engagement, and journalism. I've written a book about social media and social change, called Liberation Technology in El Salvador: Re-appropriating Social Media Among Alternative Media Projects (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017), which won the AEJMC-Knudson Latin America Book Prize in 2018. I've also published numerous scholarly articles examining news coverage of protests globally.
When I'm not working, you can find me traveling (usually in Latin America so I can put my Spanish and Portuguese skills to use); hanging out with my dog, Piñata; or eating breakfast tacos, drinking Diet Dr Pepper, and listening to Dave Matthews Band on repeat.