Dr. Mwithia is a lecturer in the School of Communication at the University of Technology

Sydney (UTS), Australia. She holds a Ph.D. in communication from UTS. She has over 15

years’ experience teaching in institutions of higher learning and doing research. Jesica is an

avid qualitative researcher. She is adept with interpretivist, discourse analysis, and

phenomenological study approaches. She has a keen interest in participatory research

designs that emphasize the co-creation of knowledge with the study participants and

consequently amplify the voices of study participants. This includes photovoice She is a

2021 research fellow of the African Peacebuilding Network (APN) under the Social Science

Research Council (SSRC) funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York. Under this fellowship,

she used a qualitative research approach to analyze the phenomenon of othering in Kenya’s

political discourses in the run-up to the 2022 elections. Before joining academia, Mwithia

worked with non-governmental organizations. Mwithia’s research interests cut across

different sub-disciplines of strategic communication. They include communication

technologies and society, corporate communication, she has supervised 5 Ph.D.

students to completion and 10 master’s students.

Research Interests:

• Communication and Communication Technologies in Social Change
• Development Communication
• Health Communication
• Political Communication