Mohammad A. Auwal joined California State University, Los Angeles, as an assistant professor in 1994 and has been a professor in the Department of Communication Studies since 2006. He earned his Ph.D. in organizational communication from Ohio University in 1994. He has held teaching and research appointments at four universities abroad and served as a Fulbright Scholar at Qatar University from 2008 to 2010.
His teaching spans organizational communication, public relations, communication theory, research methods, intercultural communication, leadership, argumentation, and globalization. During the 2026–27 academic year, he is teaching Argumentation, Public Relations, Organizational Communication, and Humanistic Methods of Communication Research.
His research examines how people organize for social change, the ethics of strategic communication, and the ways political mythologies and failures of knowledge contribute to social injustice. His scholarship has appeared in publications including Communication Theory, Communication Monographs, the Journal of Business Communication, and The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs. His most recent article, "Witnessing Gaza: Communicational Catalysis and the Colonial Epistemology of Grievability," is forthcoming in Media, Culture & Society. He serves on the editorial board of the Western Journal of Communication and reviews for the International Communication Association, the National Communication Association, and the Western States Communication Association, at whose conferences he regularly presents.
His doctoral research examined the organizational practices of Grameen Bank, the Bangladeshi rural development institution that shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize with its founder, Muhammad Yunus. He has also published more than 100 columns and commentaries in outlets including the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Orange County Register, and The Daily Star of Dhaka.
He is currently writing Why the Honest Lose: How Corruption Organizes—and How Integrity Can Fight Back, a work of narrative nonfiction about how collective organization can turn individual acts of integrity into lasting resistance.
Auwal grew up in Bangladesh, where he earned his B.A. with honors and M.A. in English literature. Before coming to the United States for graduate study in 1990, he served for nearly seven years in the Bangladesh Civil Service, first as an information officer and later as an assistant director in the Ministry of Information.