Lusike Mukhongo

Dr. Lusike Mukhongo is an associate professor of communication in the School of Communication. Her research bridges global media, open-source low-power AI, and community-engaged digital storytelling. She collaborates across disciplines to research participatory cultures, diasporic identities, media technologies, AI, and non-extractive storytelling approaches. She is committed to equitable interdisciplinary collaborations and community partnerships. Her work bridges academia and community, emphasizing non-extractive and non-intrusive community-engaged digital storytelling and participatory technologies. She explores how mobile media and low-power technologies are reimagined and reappropriated by users in historically underserved communities and the Global South through community-driven innovations and community-engaged digital storytelling.  She is the faculty lead for the Community Engaged Digital Storytelling (CEDST) Lab and is currently piloting the G.A.M.E Lab: Prototyping the Future of Film, Games, and Interactive Storytelling. She has received grants to fund her research from Mozilla Foundation, the British Academy, Africa No Filter among others and has been awarded a Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship. Her PhD was funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and her Guest PhD research at Groningen University, the Netherlands was funded by the Coimbra Group Scholarship Programme for Young African Researchers. Her work has appeared in Critical Arts, Gender and Development, Africa Spectrum, African Studies, and Journal of African Media Studies among others.