Jyotika Ramaprasad is Professor in the School of Communication at the University of Miami. Previously, she has held positions of administrative responsibility as Associate and Interim Dean in Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
While her earlier research focused on newsflow, media representation, and advertising, her recent interests are in journalism studies and social and behavioral change communication. Almost all of Ramaprasad’s past and current work is international in orientation spanning Africa, Asia, and Europe. She has also been a Fulbright scholar at an Indian institute of communication and a Fulbright Specialist in Germany and South Africa.
In the area of journalism studies, Ramaprasad is part of two major collaborative projects: the BRICS media systems project funded by the Academy of Finland and the Worlds of Journalism Study (WJS) funded from various sources. For the BRICS study, Ramaprasad conducted indepth interviews with journalists in two cities in India. An edited volume, based on the empirical part of the BRICS study, in which the BRICS research team surveyed journalists in all BRICS countries, has now been published. Ramaprasad is co-editor of this book: Pasti, S., & Ramaprasad, J. (Eds.). (2017). Contemporary BRICS Journalism: Non-Western Media in Transition. NY: Routledge. For the WJS study, Ramaprasad collected quantitative data in two countries, Botswana and India. For this project too, she is coediting a book. In the area of social and behavior change, the current study that is most advanced in its execution, and has both research and applied parts to it, examines interactions between the Roma and health care professionals in Macedonia with the goal of improving their quality.
Along with co-PIs, Ramaprasad has received US State Department grants totaling more than a million dollars for capacity building in journalism and communication for social change in South Asia and East Africa. On the curriculum development front, Ramaprasad has provided consulting help to a group of journalism/communication educators from five East African countries for their environmental journalism/social change curriculum and has, in some cases under the auspices of the State Department grants, advised several educational institutions in Africa and Asia. Ramaprasad has also consulted on formative research, campaign design, and monitoring and evaluation for disaster preparedness in Southeast Asia and for health care professional-patient relationships in Macedonia.
Ramaprasad has published her research in the International Communication Gazette, International Communication Research Journal, Journalism Quarterly, Journalism Studies, Newspaper Research Journal, Asian Journal of Communication, Mass Communication & Society, The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising, Social Marketing Quarterly, and other journals. She has also presented her research at international and national conferences. She is on editorial boards of journals and reviews regularly for these and other journals.
Ramaprasad has taught international communication, graphics, advertising, theory, and method courses. Currently, she teaches communication for social change using both structural and individual level approaches from critical, psychological, and communication theory perspectives. The course content spans the full spectrum from theoretically and culturally founded formative research through intervention and message design to evaluation using indigenous values and privileging local knowledge as relevant. She also teaches intercultural communication where she supplements theory with examples from her repertoire of experiences during her work related travel in various countries, roughly 70 to date, of the world. She has directed dissertations and theses on various topics, guest taught in Europe and Asia, and mentored students as faculty member and vice dean for graduate studies. She has received research grants that have enabled her to provide international data collection field experience to doctoral students.
Featured Projects
Enabling Better Health Care Professional-Roma Interactions in Macedonia