Ava Francesca Battocchio

Ava Francesca is a doctoral student and University Enrichment Fellow in the Department of Advertising + Public Relations. Prior to joining Michigan State, they concurrently completed their Master of Science in Global Strategic Communication(2020) and Bachelor of Arts in Advertising(2019), as Loyola University Chicago's School of Communication's first dual-degree student. 

Their research centers on how rural and post-industrial community structures and collective identity shape hybrid civic storytelling networks, or how people come to share information that impacts civic life. Ava Francesca is particularly interested in former mining and manufacturing communities in the Great Lakes region that simultaneously grapple with economic changes and shifting media landscapes in the form of declining local news and inequities in digital access. Ava Francesca is particularly fascinated in tackling these questions through combining ethnographic and computational methods. 

Ava Francesca is an active member of the ComArtSci research community as a graduate student lab manager in the Civic Infrastructure Lab, an affiliate with the Rural Computing Research Consortium, and a Research Fellow with the Quello Center. Ava Francesca also serves as a graduate student liaison for the AEJMC History Division and AEJMC Communication Theory and Methods Division.