Aaisha Dadi Patel

Media Studies and Production

Aaisha Dadi Patel was most recently a journalist at the Wall Street Journal’s Africa bureau, where she led coverage of the coronavirus pandemic and economic news from South Africa. Prior to that, she was an online reporter at the Mail & Guardian, where she was content coordinator of the 2019 200 Young South Africans project, and was a member of the founding team of The Daily Vox, most notably lauded for coverage of the #FeesMustFall protests in 2015 and 2016. Her contributions have appeared in international publications, including The Continent, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Teen Vogue, and Deutsche Welle. Her reporting covered a broad spectrum of topics, including politics, business, gender, and human interest, with a focus on Africa and other emerging markets.  

Aaisha joins UCT from the University of the Witwatersrand, where she taught undergraduate and honours level Media Studies students on consumer culture, audience studies, new media production, and representations of gender and race in media texts. She holds an MA in Media Studies from Wits, which awarded her the 2019 Stuart Hall Prize for Excellence in Postgraduate Research. Her research on Muslim women was published in the 2018 anthology of essays, Feminism Is (Kwela). Aaisha is an alumna of the British Council’s 2017 Future News Worldwide initiative, and is a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar. 

Research interests:

  • Gender
  • Islam
  • Representation
  • Identity
  • Community media
  • New media forms
  • Young people and media
  • Consumer culture
  • Audience studies
  • Cultural studies