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faculty news
Faculty Awards & Achievements
Randal Beam is one of 13 U.S. and international journalism educators awarded an Academic Fellowship for a seminar held last June at Columbia University on teaching about traumatic injury. The seminar is a new program of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma founded in this department but now housed at Columbia, and receives support from the UW Center for Global Studies. Professor Beam teaches reporting and media courses and has co-authored an article about journalists and trauma. He is active in the Media Management and Economics Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). He serves on the editorial boards of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly and of the International Journal on Media Management.
W. Lance Bennett and UW Computer Science professor Alan Borning received a $733,000 award from the NSF Social-Computational Systems Program for a three-year project titled Socio-Computational Systems to Support Public Engagement and Deliberation. Bennett and Borning are developing new ways for citizens and government to communicate. Their approach includes several innovative components, such as systems to facilitate adding crisp, relatively neutral summaries alongside advocacy statements; jointly authored position statements, with flexible ways to sign on to existing statements, fork new ones, and understand and track changes; and enhanced moderation techniques. A partnership with the City of Seattle is enabling Bennett and Borning to test their ideas and systems in actual use.
The Master of Communication, Digital Media (MCDM) appointed The Common Language Project (CLP) as MCDM "Storytellers in Residence." The CLP staff (Sarah Stuteville, Jessica Partnow, and Alex Stonehill) will manage MCDM’s Flip The Media blog, support their students with occasional skills-based workshops, and teach a storytelling class for MCDM in the spring quarter.
Anita Verna Crofts and Scott Macklin have come on board with the MCDM full-time as Associate Directors. As the program continues to grow and establish itself as a national leader in digital communication, it will continue to focus on its fundamental priority: academic and operational excellence for its community.
Mike Henderson has a new book. The Obligatory Year (fiction), published in August of this year, tells the story of Tom Flynn, former film critic and presently a lecturer teaching mass-media writing at a university in Portland, Ore., who loses his wife and then suspects she had been pregnant. Troubling is the fact that they hadn't had sex for two months. Flynn suddenly is consigned to "The Obligatory Year" of dealing with grief and immediately is descended upon by three very different women. For more information on the book, visit: www.smashwords.com/books/view/21004
The UW Graduate Council elected Philip Howard, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, to represent the Division of Social Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences Council.
Howard has a new book, Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam. Digital Origins investigates the impact of digital technologies on civic life in countries with significant Muslim communities. The book uses some innovative comparative methods to look at how technologies like the mobile phone and Internet have changed the very meaning of citizenship. Howard covers state capacity, political parties, journalism and civil society. There is also a chapter on how new technologies make some dictators better dictators. Read more about the book at http://faculty.washington.edu/pnhoward/publishing/internetislam/internetislam.html
Communication faculty Ralina Joseph and Crispin Thurlow are among a handful of UW faculty selected to mentor the first cohort of graduate students undertaking a newly launched Certificate in Public Scholarship. Under the direction of the University’s Simpson Center for the Humanities, this project and portfolio-based certificate is designed to bring together cross-disciplinary groups of graduate students and faculty interested in: culture as a form of public practice; campus-community partnerships; non-traditional forms of scholarly dissemination; and emerging methods of community-engaged research, teaching, and service.
Scott Macklin and co-director Georgio Brown screened a work in progress version of their upcoming film Top Left — Coolout to a sold-out audience at the Langston Hughes Film Festival. For nearly 20 years, the Coolout Network has visually been the pulse through the body of Northwest Hip Hop, capturing the area’s signature moments. See the film’s trailer at http://www.vimeo.com/10961387.
Macklin and co-director Angelica Macklin will be screening their short animation piece FREE at the upcoming Seattle International Film Festival. The film peels back the image of the so-called post-apartheid “miracle” in South Africa to reveal a new generation of courageous young voices fighting for hope, reclaiming social spaces and collective memory, and telling their own stories of solidarity and social emancipation. More information on the film can be found at http://www.siff.net/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=42331&FID=166
Usha Lee McFarling joined the Department as a full-time Artist in Residence — for which she will teach a couple classes, conduct research and writing, and convene symposia on matters connected to communication and science/environment. McFarling is a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she won a 2007 Pulitzer Prize with fellow reporters Kenneth R. Weiss and Rick Loomis.
The Department collaborated with Oxford University and the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in a New York City conference on humanitarian action, development and peace-building. The conference brought together more than two dozen experts. Gerry Philipsen, an international leader in how to conduct careful, ethical research grounded in local communities and populations, is the reason that the Department had a place at this table. One of the core principles in the Department is public scholarship. All too often, rigorous and relevant scholarship undertaken in colleges and universities does not become known to the broader society. Given the importance of communication in human affairs, it is necessary that our scholarship and citizenship go hand-in-hand. Thus, a core principle of the department is a commitment to take one’s research goals and findings beyond the academy. Students and faculty are encouraged to engage in constructive dialogue not only with academics, but also with other citizens, diverse communities, and political and cultural leaders. Such dialogue increases the potential transformative power of communication scholarship, while also fulfilling a central mission of a public research university. We take this seriously. It is a regular occurrence for Department faculty to give public talks, work on behalf of causes and candidates they support, partner with local organizations, serve as sources for news media on topics of the day, and convene important public conversations. Philipsen’s presence at the NYC conference is Public Scholarship at its finest.
The Department of Communication announces the creation of the Center for Local Strategies Research at the University of Washington. Professor Gerry Philipsen and Dr. Lisa Coutu, faculty members in the Department, serve as, respectively, Director and Associate Director of the Center. The Center supports research that informs and assists efforts to develop and implement practices and policies for meeting human needs in local communities.
Joanne Silberner joined the Department as a half-time Artist in Residence. She will teach classes in journalism and health and science, will have students work with her on freelance reporting projects, and will work with faculty on a public lecture/debate series on journalism and health and science. Silberner was a health policy correspondent for National Public Radio.
Sarah Stuteville of our Common Language Project team was accepted into the Multimedia Storytelling Workshop at UC Berkeley’s Knight Digital Media Center. She spent a week last spring with 19 other journalists from across the country, learning the latest multimedia techniques and producing a multimedia package.
Crispin Thurlow, with Cardiff University Professor Adam Jaworski, has authored two books that present a unique perspective on the central role of language and communication in contemporary life. These two books arise from a large program of research Crispin has been involved in since 2001, work which will culminate in the publication later this year of a third, more ethnographically grounded book titled Language, Tourism, Globalization: The Sociolinguistics of Fleeting Relationships. The first book, Tourism Discourse: Language and Global Mobility, examines language ideologies and host-tourist relations in tourism.
In their second book, Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, Thurlow and Jaworski present an edited collection of essays that demonstrates nicely the ways language interacts with all other modalities such as visual images, nonverbal communication, and the built environment. Find more information about the book >>
Media appearances
A recap of David Domke's popular talk at Town Hall with New Yorker editor David Remnick on crosscut.com:
Remnick's “most intelligent” interview >>
John Gastil’s essay on some research involving our undergraduate students on crosscut.com:
UW survey: CNN, NPR spread Tea Party's message
Hanson Hosein spoke on KING 5's New Day Northwest about struggling five years ago to compress and distribute his documentary Independent America: The Two-Lane Search for Mom & Pop. Today, YouTube has made it easier than ever for professionals and amateurs alike to distribute video content. Read more on Flip The Media >>
Hosein’s Storytelling in the Digital Age was published in Harvard's Nieman Reports' special issue, What's Next for News. Hosein makes the case that, "Old metrics for credibility and trust no longer guide us, nor does trust emanate exclusively from the power of a brand name or from the overpowering resources of a recognized institution." Hosein elaborates on these themes in the slideshow, "The Storyteller Uprising."
