Ayala is a Gates-Cambridge scholar and PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She holds a B.A. (Hons) in Media and Communications (hons) from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an M.A. (with distinction) in Political Communications from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has previously worked as a journalist and an advocate for refugees rights in Israel, and is currently a research associate at Molad (The Centre for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy).
Ayala’s PhD research focuses on populism in power and its implications for journalism, news audiences and knowledge production. Through semi-structured interviews, rhetoric analysis, public opinion survey and thematic analysis of media coverage and social media content, she examines how journalists cope with populist campaigns against the press. Her research investigates the role of journalism in divided societies and backsliding democracies, and questions the coping strategies used by journalists under attack to defend the media as a social institution.
