Summer Harlow is the associate director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and a visiting associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Previously she was an associate journalism professor in the Valenti School of Communication at the University of Houston, and an assistant professor of social media at Florida State University.
A former journalist, her research examines the challenges and opportunities for alternative media, independent journalism, freedom of expression, and activism brought on by emerging technologies, particularly in Latin America and the Global South. She has written two books: Digital Native News and the Remaking of Latin American Mainstream and Alternative Journalism (Routledge, 2022), which won the Kappa Tau Alpha Frank Luther Mott book award for best journalism and mass communication research and the AEJMC-Knudson Latin America book prize, and Liberation Technology in El Salvador: Re-appropriating Social Media among Alternative Media Projects (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017), which also won the AEJMC-Knudson award.
Her research has been published in top peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Communication, International Journal of Press/Politics, New Media & Society, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, and Digital Journalism. Currently, she is the primary investigator for El Salvador and Guatemala in the Wolds of Journalism Study. She also is the Book Reviews Editor for the International Journal of Press/Politics.