Zulker Naeen is an interdisciplinary researcher and development practitioner whose academic formation and professional trajectory sit at the confluence of Media Studies, Journalism, Communication, and Development Studies.
He completed a Bachelor’s in Media Studies & Journalism and a Master’s in Communication at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB). Later, he expanded his theoretical grounding with a Master’s in Development Studies from the Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB), a combination that underpins his work bridging scholarly inquiry and field-facing practice.
This layered disciplinary foundation enables him to deploy communication theory, journalistic method and development frameworks in the analysis and design of interventions that address information disorder, civic literacy and grassroots problems.
As a faculty member in the Department of Media Studies and Journalism at ULAB and as Research Coordinator at ULAB’s Centre for Critical and Qualitative Studies (CQS), he teaches and mentors on courses that synthesize strategy, ethics and technique—Strategic Public Relations, Communications for Development, Critical Thinking and Logic, Fact-checking and Digital Forensics, and Independent Journalism—preparing students to move fluidly between newsroom practice, public-interest investigation and policy-relevant research.
His classroom practice is informed by hands-on verification work and project leadership carried out through Fact-Watch and regional collaborations. He helps translate empirical research into teachable modules and active learning exercises.
Zulker’s research focus is organised around Digital Media and Information Studies, Synthetic Media Studies, Digital Literacy and Digital Citizenry, and their intersections with gender, democracy and civic participation.
He studies how narratives move across platforms and borders, how synthetic media technologies alter evidentiary practices, and how gendered power relations shape both the production and effects of false information; his writings and policy commentaries articulate the theoretical stakes while proposing concrete institutional and pedagogical responses.
In published essays, he has traced the transnational dynamics of disinformation in South Asia, argued for whole-of-society approaches to fact-checking, and documented how misinformation is weaponised against women—each piece grounded in empirical observation and oriented toward practice.
Practically, his work blends qualitative field research with open-source digital forensics and OSINT techniques. He leverages mixed methods—ethnographic interviews, content and discourse analysis, geolocation and metadata verification—to reconstruct information supply chains and attribute patterns of coordinated inauthentic behaviour.
Throughout his career, he has actively translated research into curriculum and capacity building. He has designed specialised training modules and short courses on basic fact-checking and verification toolkits for grassroots practitioners. These pedagogical products are tailored to the needs of journalists in Bangladesh and the broader South Asia region, and are deployed in workshops, fact-checking schools and university classrooms.
His curriculum development emphasises locally-situated problem sets, hands-on verification labs, and gender-sensitive safeguards, ensuring that training is both technically rigorous and ethically attentive.
At the same time, his leadership in regionally focused projects—such as contributing to a draft strategy for South Asian collaboration on transnational misinformation—illustrates how his scholarship moves beyond description to institutional design and policy engagement.
That pathway equips him with a rare combination of strategic communications skills, investigative craft, and curriculum design expertise, enabling him to operate as an interdisciplinary researcher-development practitioner who can convene scholars, train journalists, advise policymakers and support grassroots actors.
In public fora and peer networks, he positions Disinformation Studies as an applied, action-oriented discipline—one that requires methodological pluralism, ethical reflexivity and sustained investment in digital literacy and civic capacity.
His work therefore insists that solutions to information disorder must integrate pedagogical interventions, verification infrastructures, cross-border cooperation and gender-aware policies, and his published commentaries and project briefs offer concrete recommendations for each of these domains.
