Communication - February, 2006
from Jerry Baldasty, chair

Download a Microsoft Word version of the February, 2006 "Communication"

Save the date.

Friday, February 10.

UW Symposium on Social Movements & Online Collective Action.
1-5 pm. Room 104 Communication.
Program

Monday, February 13.

Professor Susan Zaeske, from the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will give a colloquium on Monday, February 13, 1:30 to 3 p.m. in 126 Communications. She will speak on: “Imagining Citizenship: Angelina Grimke, Frances E.W. Harper and the Book of Esther.”

Wednesday, March 29—Scheidel Lecture

Professor Barbara Warnick will be this year’s Scheidel Lecturer. The lecture, "Interactivity as a Rhetorical Dimension of Web-Based Political Campaigning" will be on Wednesday, March 29, 3:30 p.m.. A reception will follow 5-6 p.m. in 126 Communications.

Thursday, April 6.

Scholarships Celebration, 3-5 p.m., in the Walker Ames Room, Kane Hall.

Thursday, April 27.

Alumni Open House, starting at 6 p.m. Events include a conversation with UW football coach Tyrone Willingham.

Saturday, May 20.

The Crowell Run at Green Lake.

People.

Barbara Warnick will be speaking on “Critical Literacy and Persuasion on the
World Wide Web” at the Winter 2006 Writing Pedagogy Forum at the University of Washington, Bothell, on Friday, February 10. The session description: “Users’ experiences with Web-based messages are often complicated by the question of whether information on the sites they encounter is credible. We will consider whether message credibility is necessarily tied to identifying a message source, and, if not, what other elements of Web site might be analyzed to enable students to make informed decisions about the credibility of website content.”

The Department of Communication is helping to sponsor noted film maker Vilsoni Hereniko during spring quarter; he will be teaching in the Department of Anthropology - the course is Pacific Islanders in Film and Literature (Anth 469, AES 498).

The Department’s web page includes some of the highlights of undergraduate Karen Johnson’s internship at the Cambodia Daily in summer 2005. The Journalism Foreign Intrigue Scholarship makes this internship possible; the Department is reviewing applicants for summer 2006. Thanks to Paul Ford for his work on the web page.

Nancy Rivenburgh is serving on the Department of Sociology chair search committee (with K. Sivaramakrishnan from Anthropology and Steve Pfaff from Sociology).

Giorgia Aiello has been awarded a Summer Residency Dissertation Fellowship by the Simpson Center for summer 2006. Giorgia’s dissertation examines the ways in which a sense of a collective European identity is being constructed in contemporary European visual discourse. Aiello examines visual texts such as public communication materials, photography exhibits and film in the light of European integration and overall processes of globalization; she also highlights how visual imagination has increasingly become cross-culturally strategic and thus also a privileged site for the construction of transnational identities.

Our condolences go to Kathy Gill, at the death of her mother, Ellen J. Dollar Gill.

From Lisa Coutu, in Rome:

“Under the direction of Professor Tony Giffard, another group of Communication students is currently in Rome studying European Media Systems (with Giffard), Intercultural Communication (with UW Senior Lecturer Lisa Coutu), Roman Civilization (with Roman professor Leonardo Distaso), and Italian language. The 26 students are immersed in Roman life, living in apartments in nearby neighborhoods and learning what it means to live "la dolce vita!"

“Our excursions include all of Rome's wonderful sights -- the Capitoline Museums, the forum, the Colosseum, Palatine Hill, the Borghese Gallery, EUR, the Vatican Museums, St. Peter's Basilica (and the many other amazing churches of Rome), and the everyday life of the city. As well, the program includes trips to Ostia Antica (Rome's original port), Orvieto, and Capri. In addition, students are enjoying the proximity of Rome to other destinations and have traveled to Barcelona, Budapest, Florence, Pisa, Venice, London, and Dublin . . . so far!

“The 24-hour lab that being in Rome provides is amazing! The students' papers about how their interactions reflect intercultural theories and their presentations about the media systems of various European countries demonstrate the value of learning about these ideas on site.”

Lisa adds:

“It’s amazing – really beyond words – to see the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the frescoes in the many awe-inspiring churches, the fountains . . . unbelievable. We are learning as much of the history to go along with these sights as we can, and we are quickly learning that there is more to learn than we will have time, even with the 12 weeks we are here.”

This quarter, the Department of Communication and the Office of Undergraduate Education offer their third Speech Link, taught by Matt McGarrity. The speech links work with large lecture courses to offer students an opportunity to study public speaking within the context of a specific university course. This quarter, students in the course "Religion, Violence, and Peace," which examines historic episodes of religious conflict, will perform speeches on the relationship between religion and peace. In addition to writing and performing speeches urging action, students this quarter will have the chance to develop a research paper into a polished oral presentation. Students must research and write a detailed case study examining an episode of religious violence for the "Religion, Violence, and Peace" course. Students in the speech link will then transform this 15 page paper into a 10 minute speech.

In a recent letter to the Lawrence family, Lance Bennett – the Ruddick C. Lawrence Professor Communication -- described some of the activities of the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement. Here’s an excerpt:

CCCE continues to be a place where research and the learning process intersect, and students apply what they learn in the classroom to the world around them. We continue to operate Student Voices, a civic education project in the Seattle Schools with support from the Norcliffe and Charlotte Martin foundations. In addition, we are beginning to expand into community programs for young people. We hope to help develop resource networks and experiences that make a difference, particularly for kids at risk. The most exciting development in this area is a new project with University of Washington student internships to place trained students in classrooms and community programs to facilitate youth engagement. This effort is part of a campus wide civic engagement initiative that we are developing. The idea is for University of Washington students to take a short course in citizenship and contemporary democracy followed by an internship experience that applies what they have learned. We have partnered with the Harvard Campaign for Civic Engagement, which supports bringing our student leaders to Harvard twice a year to help coordinate this national effort.

Another exciting outreach program is our new CCCE Citizen Roundtable speaker series that draws top talent from the university to make presentations on timely topics to a growing group of interested community members and CCCE supporters. This year’s series includes lively discussions of the problem of press dependence on government, the impact of fundamentalist religion on contemporary politics, the privatization of public space, the transformation of US foreign policy, and privacy and the internet.

In other news from the CCCE: An international team led by Kirsten Foot is completing a comparative analysis of the role of the Web in national elections in 20 countries across Europe, Australasia, and North America. Results from the European cases will be appear soon in a special issue of the journal Information Polity. Findings from the whole project will be published in The Internet and National Elections: A Global Comparative Perspective, edited by Randolph Kluver, Kirsten Foot, Nicholas Jankowski, and Steven Schneider, forthcoming from Routledge. A team headed by Lance Bennett is nearing completion of a book project on the dependency of the press on government spin during the Iraq War: W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston, Why the Press Fails: The Battle for Public Information in America from Iraq to Hurricane Katrina, forthcoming, University of Chicago Press. A new project has just been funded, with a team at CCCE headed by Lance Bennett joining Belgian and Canadian scholars to investigate ways in which citizen activists are using new information technologies to engage more effectively in politics.

Jerry Baldasty has been reappointed an adjunct professor in Women Studies and in American Ethnic Studies. He also chaired a committee drafting implementation plans for the proposals from the Committee to Improve the UW Undergraduate Experience. He and graduate student April Peterson represented the department at a recent celebration honoring women of color in local television. Among those honored were alumna (and Hall of Fame member) Lori Matsukawa. Jerry also represented the department at a recent Black History Month celebration on campus.

As noted in the January newsletter, Ohio University’s School of Communication Studies has honored Gerry Philipsen with the 2005 Boase Prize for Scholarship in Communication. Below is an excerpt from the OU College of Communication website:

Gerry Philipsen, professor at the University of Washington, was this year's recipient of the Paul Boase Prize for Scholarship. As part of the prize, Philipsen traveled to Athens to present the Boase Lecture on Thursday, Jan. 19.

Established in 2003 by Boase's widow Connie Boase, the prize is designed to pay tribute to memory of Paul Boase, founding director of School of Interpersonal Communication (now the School of Communication Studies), by bringing in a caring mentor committed to scholarship and teaching, as Boase was….

According to Christina S. Beck, chair of the Boase Prize selection committee, this year's pool of nominees was particularly impressive. “We had several renowned scholars applying for this distinction,” she said, “but we agreed Gerry stood the test of time, especially his commitment to mentoring. Many of his graduate students are now leaving their own distinctive marks on our field. They all started with Gerry.”

Throughout his career, Philipsen has been recognized for excellence in research and teaching. Philipsen's work on cultural codes has inspired numerous doctoral dissertations and programs of research. Among other awards, Philipsen received the Faculty Award for Distinguished Contribution to Lifelong Learning from the University of Washington in 2002.

“I have the great pleasure of thanking you for this award,” Philipsen said. “When other people get big awards, they say how humbled they are. I feel very elevated. I've tried over the past few weeks to get this worked into conversation with all my friends.”

As part of his recognition, Philipsen received a $1,000 honorarium and presented the annual Boase Lecture Thursday at Baker Center. The title of his talk was “A Modest Proposal for the Improvement of America's Conversation about Race and Social Difference.”

Drawing from three events, Philipsen examined how and whether to talk about one's self and others in terms of race and social difference in a contemporary American conversation.

The first case involved the former president of the University of Washington making a comment about a distinguished student and Mexican immigrant. He referred to the student as an illegal alien fleeing from authorities as he crossed the boarder into the U.S. The second case dealt with author Saul Bellow's characterization of a black man as a sexual predator and thief with animal-like qualities. The last incident involved a parody published in a student publication at the University of Washington. The parody featured black students admitted to the University of Washington under the Equal Opportunity Program as if participants of a prison release program.

In each of these cases, he said, a white person is speaking or writing about a person of color. The resultant responses from the challenger, or the person of color, involved hurt and anger. As for the defender, the white person, the response to the challenger usually consisted of a charge of defective interpretation, in other words, insisting the reader or listener took it the wrong way. This type of response, Philipsen found, only instigated further negative response from the challenger.

“When I started this project, it was not my intention to be critical or take one side or other,” he said. “What I habitually do, as a principle and as an ethnographer, is try to understand what's going on. Having analyzed this, there are some simple things that some people can do that might improve America's conversation about race and social difference.”

In his conclusion, Philipsen suggested a white person shouldn't refer a man of color as a lawbreaker, as animalistic or a sexual predator. If this were to happen unintentionally, though, the speaker should not employ defective interpretation, as this route never solves the problem. Lastly, he said if something offensive was said, the speaker should simply apologize and recognize the inappropriateness and hurtfulness.

“These are simple suggestions,” he said. “They're so simple, they seem embarrassingly obvious.”

Alumni and Visitors

Recent visitors to Kathleen Fearn Banks’ course on Crisis Cases in Digital Media include alumnus (and Communication Hall of Fame member) David Marriott, from Gogerty Stark. Marriott spoke on using digital media to recover from crises, focusing particularly on the case of one his clients—Alaska Airlines. Other visitors included Pete Pedersen, Edelman Public Relations, who spoke on the launching of Xbox 360 and blogs, and alumnus Dan Schwalbe, lead security engineer for UW Computing and Communications, who spoke on Securing Cyberspace in Higher Ed.

Recent visitors to Karen Rathe’s Community Journalism class include alumnus (and Communication Hall of Fame member) Neil McReynolds, former editor, former press secretary to Gov. Dan Evans, and a director on numerous corporate and civic boards; Vera Chan-Pool, editor of the North Seattle Herald-Outlook and Madison Park Times, and Erik Hansen, editor of the Beacon Hill News/South County Journal. Investigative reporter Scott North, from The Herald (Everett) visited Mike Henderson’s reporting class. Anne Koch, a former Seattle Times reporter, visited Deb Kaplan’s Advanced Reporting class, to talk about covering police and courts, and David Domke visited the class to talk about the use of public opinion polls in journalism.

Mentor lunch speakers have included alumna Beth Clark (now an attorney at Foster Pepper), alumna Lisa Cohen (a freelance television producer),and alumnus David Keene (a securities analyst and executive). Other visitors to campus include alumnus Tim Douthitt – now an executive in a cardio-equipment company, and Kim Hunter. Hunter, a UW Business alumnus, is the founder and CEO of Lagrant Communications, a multimillion dollar integrated marketing company in Los Angeles. Hunter met with Communication and Business students to talk about careers in public relations, marketing and advertising. He also invited students to apply for the Lagrant Foundation’s internships and scholarships. Thanks to Victoria Sprang and the UW central development office for setting up the Hunter meeting with students.

Jerry Baldasty also met with alumna Rita Brogan (BA, 1972, MA 1975), CEO of the Seattle-based Pacific Rim Resources (a public relations and marketing company that specializes in environmental issues). Rita has chaired the Washington State Women’s Council, served on the Mayor’s Environmental Management Committee, Transportation Research Boards Marketing and Fare Policy Committee and is chair of the Seattle-King County Municipal League’s Board of Directors.

The Department of Communication was one of the sponsors of the Collegiate Journalism Conference, January 21, 2006, on campus. Speakers included: Doug Kim, arts and entertainment editor, The Seattle Times; Randy Trick, Skagit Valley Herald; Nate Isaacs, Society of Professional Journalists Region 10 Director, Reporter, Tri-City Herald; Elaine Thompson, AP photographer; Betty Udesen, staff photographer for The Seattle Times; Bill Virgin, business columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer; Nicole Brodeur, columnist for The Seattle Times; Ken Bunting, Associate Publisher, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer; Bill Ristow, Seattle Times features editor; Florangela Davila, reporter, The Seattle Times; Lori Matsukawa, KING 5; Tracy Vedder, KOMO 4; Caroline Chen, Bellingham Herald; Teresa Scribner, The Seattle Times designer; Nathan Adams, art director/designer, Studio Opolis; Terry Tazioli, Travel Editor, The Seattle Times; George Erb, Puget Sound Business Journal; Caret Quan Gelernter, projects editor, The Seattle Times; Michelle Nicolosi, assistant managing editor, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer; Kirsten Kendrick, SPJ Western Washington Pro Chapter President; Alex Johnson, Education Chair, SPJ Western Washington Pro Chapter, and reporter, MSNBC.com.

Other Alumni News

Danielle Endres, a 2005 Ph.D. graduate of the Department of Communication and now an assistant professor at the University of Utah, is teaching Argumentation Theory and Intercultural Communication. Last semester, she taught Native American Social Movements. Her current research is about nuclear waste siting and Native American Tribes, comparing the Yucca Mountain site (the subject of her dissertation) and the Goshutes reservation nuclear waste site in Utah.

Department Web Page

Thanks to Paul Ford for his steady and creative work on our departmental web page.

For example, look at the posting on the presentation by our Honors students late last quarter.

Also look at the redesign of the alumni web page and the new Narrative Journalist site – which Paul and Si Wong developed in consultation with Deborah Kaplan.

The latter site displays some superb work from Deborah’s autumn quarter class in narrative journalism.

Download a Microsoft Word version of the February, 2006 "Communication"