Razan Aljohani

Razan Aljohani is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Her research explores journalism practice in Saudi Arabia and its intersection with religion, tribal systems and government ideology. She examines the implications of Saudi Vision 2030 for journalists' work, with particular attention to women journalists and their evolving roles in public discourse.

Before joining Merrill College, Aljohani earned a master's degree in mass communication from Georgia State University, where her research analyzed how national transformations shape Saudi women journalists' contributions to newspapers — both the topics they cover and how they negotiate professional identity in a shifting media system. She served as a teaching assistant in the Communication and Media Department at Taibah University, teaching Introduction to Saudi Arabian Media and Digital Journalism in the Arab Region, where students reported and investigated stories on their own campus. She also advised first-year women entering the profession and academia. 

Aljohani's work is rooted in the conviction that studying Arab media without cultural context obscures how journalism actually functions in those settings. She uses research to build a foundation for comparative scholarship on how journalistic norms adapt across different political and social systems, and on how journalists navigate professional identity within them.

Areas of Interest

• Professional identity and journalistic role conceptions
• Religion, culture and media
• Gender and media labor

Education 

• B.A. (Journalism), Taibah University (Saudi Arabia)
• M.A. (Mass Communication), Georgia State University

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