Precolonial formations
The project begins with the ethnic, linguistic, religious, and regional forms of belonging that shaped social and political life before modern broadcasting.
Research
I study how media institutions and technologies shape political identity, public trust, and belonging, with primary attention to Ghana and African digital publics.
Dissertation research · Ghana
Discussions of digital politics often treat social media as the beginning of a new political era. My dissertation places these platforms within a longer history of political communication in Ghana.
The project examines how radio helped produce and circulate ideas about ethnicity, language, religion, region, citizenship, and political belonging. It then considers how these identities move into digital spaces, where they are repeated, contested, and reorganized.
By tracing connections across Ghana’s media history, the project explains how contemporary digital politics carries both new forms of participation and older structures of political division.
Discuss this researchHistorical frame
The dissertation traces identity and political communication through three connected periods. This approach places today’s platform politics within the longer development of institutions, broadcasting, and public life in Ghana.
The project begins with the ethnic, linguistic, religious, and regional forms of belonging that shaped social and political life before modern broadcasting.
It then examines how British colonial administration classified populations and introduced centralized broadcasting as part of a new political communication structure.
The final period follows radio from the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation’s early dominance through liberalization and into the contemporary social media environment.
Research areas
Across my research, I examine how communication technologies become sites where people establish credibility, negotiate identity, build communities, and struggle over political meaning.
How do newer media absorb, reorganize, or reproduce the political forms created by older communication systems? This area connects Ghana’s radio history with contemporary platform politics.
How do ethnicity, race, language, region, nationality, and political affiliation shape participation? I study how these identities influence belonging, division, and public expression.
This work examines social media as a space where Black political identities are debated and where competing understandings of resistance, pessimism, optimism, and collective action emerge.
I also investigate how platform cues, candidate identity, artificial intelligence, and humanlike communication influence credibility, trust, and user experience.
Selected projects
These projects extend my broader interest in media, political communication, identity, credibility, and digital public life.
A study of the language, narratives, and public identities that developed around Ghana’s #FixTheCountry campaign during its peak period in 2021.
This project places Afro-pessimism and Black optimism in conversation to examine how social media users discuss Black struggle, possibility, solidarity, and political action.
An experimental study of how candidate identity, policy credibility, and platform context may influence political evaluation and voter response.
Research examining how anthropomorphism, social presence, expectations, emotional response, and perceived control shape people’s experiences with automated service agents.
Selected publication
My published work examines how news framing shapes public understanding of geopolitical conflict, with attention to narrative construction, institutional position, and media bias.
John Acquaful
Read the publicationResearch conversations
I welcome conversations about Ghanaian media history, political communication, digital activism, identity, research collaboration, and related academic projects.