Dr Pitcher joined UKZN permanently in 2016 upon completing her PhD, entitled Deviant Doodling: Contextualising the Discourses of Zapiro in a Socially Responsible Press. She has since established herself in the Media and Communication academic community, serving on the South African Communications Association Executive between 2019 and 2021 as the Convenor for Communication Science, and as an external examiner for numerous local and international universities. She is also tasked with working as a peer-reviewer for a number of top-tiered journals and publishers, which helps to inform her extensive teaching portfolio.