Danyel Ferrari

Danyel Ferrari’s research and professional practice examine how social media shapes public understanding, moral feeling, and policy. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, visual cultural analysis, and qualitative methods, she studies how narratives, images, and emotions circulate across digital media and become mobilized in political, cultural, and institutional decision-making. Her interdisciplinary work brings together media studies, gender and migration studies, art history, and visual culture to investigate the relationships among representation, affect, power, and collective action.

Ferrari earned her Ph.D. in Media Studies from Rutgers University in May 2026. Her dissertation, Art in the Age of Empathy-Production, examines the rise and circulation of “empathy deficit” discourse on social media, which is simultaneously blamed for eroding empathy and serves as a primary site where anxieties about that perceived deficit are produced and amplified. The project traces how this discourse has contributed to growing expectations that art and cultural institutions should produce measurable emotional education and social outcomes. She is currently developing the dissertation into a book manuscript. Ferrari teaches media and communication courses at Rutgers’ School of Communication and Information, where she has taught since 2020. Her professional experience also includes higher education labor communications and organizing, multimedia campaign development, and public-facing communications.

Ferrari has published research on migration and memorial art, including a chapter in the recent Making Routes: Mobility and Politics of Migration in the Global South (2024). She has also presented at international conferences including the Cultural Studies Association (CSA), the International Communication Association (ICA), and the Union for Democratic Communications (UDC). Her teaching and communications work draw on her interdisciplinary research to connect media history, visual storytelling, cultural politics, and collective action.