Charlotte Lapsansky
lapsansk [at] usc [dot] edu
Charlotte Lapsansky specializes in communication for international development. Her research interests include communication for social change, entertainment-education, mobiles for development, participatory development communications, community mobilization and strategic campaign planning. Ms. Lapsansky has worked with a number of NGOS, including the BBC World Service Trust in India, South Asia Network in Los Angeles, and GOLD (a youth empowerment and HIV education organization) in South Africa on practical, research-based projects to evaluate their programs and build their communication planning capacities. Currently, Ms. Lapsansky is finishing her dissertation on the role of new technologies in participatory development, with particular emphasis on the use of mobiles to enable bottom-up content generation that allows community-level voices to participate in development. It draws heavily on her work with an NGO in India to design and implement a mobile phone community media platform to engage stakeholders in women’s rights advocacy. She was the recipient of dissertation fellowships from the American Association of University Women and the Annenberg School. Before her PhD studies, Ms. Lapsansky worked for organizations in the US and India on designing media campaigns for women's rights, health and social justice.