Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies Nancy Morris presented “De lo normativo a lo practico: Nuevas direcciones para a investigacion en comunicacion participativa” (“From the normative to the practical: New directions for research in participatory communication”), co-authored with Silvio Waisbord, at the conference of the Latin American Association of Communication Researchers (ALAIC), May 9-11 in Montevideo, Uruguay (details about the conference are here). While in Montevideo, Morris was also an invited participant in a public roundtable discussion, sponsored by a Uruguyan think tank, on the role of communciation in development processes (details here).

Nancy Morris, SCT Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies, has been promoted to the rank of full professor in the Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications and Mass Media.

Professor Hector Postigo, BTMM, MMC, presented a talk on April 21, 2011, as part of the Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series at the Center for the Humanities at Temple University. The lecture, titled “The Digital Rights Movement: Free Culture Activism and the YouTube Generation,” explored the emerging “Free Culture Movement,” discussing its dynamics, ideology and impact on consumption and creation of mass media content. The case of the Free Culture Movement was used to weave together a number of themes currently debated by internet and digital media scholars in the field of mass communication. These include 1) the tensions between optimistic participatory audience viewpoints on the power of a Web 2.0 audience and critical perspectives on the cooptation of audience “labor” by increasingly complex corporate owned systems of participation 2) the tensions between techno-legal regimes that regulate and shape participation and the resistance to those regimes through legal and extra –legal means and 3) the emergence of participatory rights discourses among media consumers vs. the legal and corporate discourse legitimating authors’ rights.

Professor Hector Postigo, BTMM, MMC, presented a talk on April 21, 2011, as part of the Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series at the Center for the Humanities at Temple University. The lecture, titled “The Digital Rights Movement: Free Culture Activism and the YouTube Generation,” explored the emerging “Free Culture Movement,” discussing its dynamics, ideology and impact on consumption and creation of mass media content. The case of the Free Culture Movement was used to weave together a number of themes currently debated by internet and digital media scholars in the field of mass communication. These include 1) the tensions between optimistic participatory audience viewpoints on the power of a Web 2.0 audience and critical perspectives on the cooptation of audience “labor” by increasingly complex corporate owned systems of participation 2) the tensions between techno-legal regimes that regulate and shape participation and the resistance to those regimes through legal and extra –legal means and 3) the emergence of participatory rights discourses among media consumers vs. the legal and corporate discourse legitimating authors’ rights.

A chapter by Associate Professor and BTMM Department Chair Patrick Murphy appears in The Handbook of Media Audiences, edited by Virginia Nightingale and published in 2011 by Wiley-Blackwell. The chapter title is “Locating Media Ethnography.” More information about the book is available here.

Assistant Professor Undrahbuyan Baasanjav, BTMM, MMC, has had her article, “Web-use Patterns for Civic Discourse: The Case of Mongolian Organizations,” published in the journal Information, Communication and Society. Click here to read it.

Also, a book chapter by Baasanjav titled “Global Digital Divide: Language Gap and Post-communism in Mongolia” will appear in E-Governance and Civic Engagement: Factors and Determinants of E-Democracy, to be published by IGI-Global in fall 2011; more information about the book is available here.