Category Archives: Mass Media & Communication

MMC faculty announced

The Mass Media and Communication Program’s faculty for the 2012-13 has been announced. MMC is the School of Media and Communication’s PhD program.

They are:

Undrahbuyan Baasanjav, Assistant Professor, MSP
Deborah Cai, Professor, STRC
John Edward Campbell, Assistant Professor, MSP
Fabienne Darling-Wolf, Associate Professor, JOUR
Brooke E. Duffy, Assistant Professor, ADV
Jan Fernback, Associate Professor, MSP
Susan Jacobson, Assistant Professor, JOUR
Tom Jacobson, Professor, MSP
Carolyn Kitch, Professor, JOUR
Matthew Lombard, Associate Professor, MSP
Michael Maynard, Associate Professor, ADV
Andrew Mendelson, Associate Professor, JOUR
Nancy Morris, Professor, MSP
Patrick Murphy, Associate Professor, MSP
Priscilla Murphy, Professor, JOUR
Donnalyn Pompper, Associate Professor, STRC
Hector Postigo, Associate Professor, MSP
Adrienne Shaw, Assistant Professor, MSP
Kaibin Xu, Assistant Professor, STRC

Professor Morris, BTMM, MMC, presents conference paper in Uruguay

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).

Professor Cai has article published in Human Communication Research

Professor Deborah Cai, STRC, MMC, is an author of an article in the April 2012 issue (Volume 38, Issue 2) of Human Communication Research. The article is titled “The Effect of Conflict Goals on Avoidance Strategies: What Does Not Communicating Communicate?”; the first and second authors are Qi Wang of Villanova University and Edward Fink of the University of Maryland.

More information is available here.

SCT professor, doctoral student, undergraduate to appear on panel at ICA conference

Professor Barry Vacker, BTMM, doctoral student Angela Cirucci, MMC, and undergraduate Genevieve Gillespie, BTMM, will be part of a panel accepted for presentation at the 2012 International Communication Association (ICA) conference in Phoenix over Memorial Day weekend. The panel is titled “Whole Earth, Fragmented Cultures and Apocalyptic Futures: Visualizing Community and Destiny on Spaceship Earth” and the papers and participants are:

Angela Cirucci — “Social Media and Facebook: Fragmented Communities, Virtual Tribes, and Video Games at the Center of Everything”
Genevieve Gillespie  — “Spaceship Earth in a Violent Universe: Apocalypses in Science Documentaries”
Jarice Hanson (University of Massachusetts) — “Reclaiming Earth after the Apocalypse”
Barry Vacker — “Art, Media and Cosmology: Visualizing Our Place and Destiny in the Universe”

Professor Postigo gives invited talk at Temple’s Center for Humanities

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 Postigo gives invited talk at Temple’s Center for Humanities

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.

Associate Professor Murphy, BTMM, MMC, has book chapter published

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.

Associate Professor Mendelson wins Outstanding Adviser Award

Associate Professor Andrew Mendelson, JOUR, MMC, has been named the 2011 recipient of the Kappa Tau Alpha college honor society’s William H. Taft Outstanding Adviser Award. KTA gives only one award each year, and the winner is chosen from many nominations of educators from top journalism schools across the country. Named in honor of the late William H. Taft, KTA executive director emeritus, the award “recognizes advisers who have compiled long-term records of superior service to KTA and who by action and example have actively promoted scholarship in our field.” Mendelson received his award Aug. 11 at the national convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in St. Louis, Mo.

Assistant Professor Baasanjav, BTMM, MMC, has article and book chapter published

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.