Laura Alberti (ABD) participated in the panel “Debating the conscience of the nation: Argumentation and debate in the 2016 presidential primary debates” at the meeting of the Southern States Communication Association in Austin, Texas in April. She also presented her paper, "From the Colonel's uniform to Libya's revolutionary art: An exploration in the argumentative trajectories of visual icons."
Professor Mike Ananny and Leila Bighash (ABD), "Why Drop a Paywall?: Mapping Industry Accounts of Online News Decommodification," International Journal of Communication. The paper was positively reviewed by Harvard's Nieman Lab: "Here are 6 reasons why newspapers have dropped their paywalls."
Emma Bloomfield (Ph.D. 2016) and Nikita Hamilton (ABD) were the recipients of the 2016 USC Areté Award, which represents the highest honor accorded graduate students and recognizes students for significant depth and scope of responsibility in a campus or community leadership role.
Bloomfield also received the Richard Cone Award for Graduate Civic Scholarship from the Joint Education Project.
Lik Sam Chan (ABD), "The Role of Gay Identity Confusion and Outness in Sex-Seeking on Mobile Dating Apps Among Men Who Have Sex With Men: A Conditional Process Analysis," Journal of Homosexuality.
Lik Sam Chan, book review of Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research Activism and Media Cultures, International Journal of Communication.
Chan presented three papers at ICA, all on mobile dating apps: “Self-Presentations on Gay Networking Apps: Comparing American and Chinese Guys Who Meet Guys on Jack’d,” “A Preliminary Exploration of Networked Intimacy: Gay Asian Americans’ Experiences of Using Dating Apps” (co-authored with James Lee), and “Predicting the Intent to Use Dating Apps to Look for Romance and Sex: Using the Integrative Model of Behavioral Prediction.”
In June and July, Chan attended the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research.
Yomna Elsayed (Fourth Year) and Andrea Wenzel (ABD), "The Egyptian Sisters Club: Negotiating community and identity in a time of conflict," Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.
Michelle Forelle (Fourth Year) interned this summer at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, working with executive director Urs Gasser on his research projects that examine the ethical and regulatory challenges of the Internet of Things and online privacy.
Traci Gillig (Third Year) and Professor Sheila Murphy, "Fostering support for LGBTQ youth?: The effects of a gay adolescent media portrayal on young viewers," International Journal of Communication.
Gillig has also been named a Teaching Assistant Fellow with the USC Center for Excellence in Teaching.
Mark Hannah (Ph.D. 2016), The Best "Worst President": What the Right Gets Wrong About Barack Obama.
Wenlin Liu (Ph.D. 2016) and Professor Aimei Yang received a Communication and Technology Division top paper award for "Cross-Sectoral Hyperlink Network and Issues Management: A Cross-National Study" at ICA.
Nathalie Maréchal (ABD), "(Mis)adventures in context collapse: A personal reflection on discussing #BlackLivesMatter on Facebook," Medium.com.
Maréchal has accepted a position for the 2016-2017 academic year as Senior Research Fellow with Ranking Digital Rights, a project hosted at the New America Foundation, that holds ICT companies accountable for their respect for users' human rights through research-based advocacy. She was previously a COMPASS fellow (2014) and Open Technology Fund Fellow with Ranking Digital Rights.
In July, Maréchal attended the Citizen Lab Summer Institute at the University of Toronto, where she workshopped a mixed-methods project to measure information controls (censorship and surveillance) on the Russian Internet, and conducted dissertation research. She has also been invited to discuss the financial surveillance of low-income people at MoneyLab, a two-day conference hosted by the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam in early December. The aim of MoneyLab is to research, map, and probe (alternative) strategies of redistribution and intervention in digital economy.
joan miller (Second Year) had her paper, “Raceplay: cross-racial pop-culture cosplay as political activism” accepted to the Comics and Popular Arts Conference at Dragon*Con. She used her summer research fellowship to attend the Experience at Comic-Con in San Diego to pursue ethnographic research on fan artists and fan art. She also took part in the Annenberg Summer Doctoral Institute for Difference in Media and Culture.
Sarah Myers West (ABD) attended the Citizen Lab Summer Institute in July to workshop a new research project developing a methodology to assess the scope and impact of flagging practices on social media platforms.
Myers West will attend the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) conference in Berlin in October to present her paper, "Ambivalence in the (Private) Public Sphere: How Global Digital Activists Navigate Risk," as well as participate in a roundtable titled "Censorship online, and the challenges of studying what's no longer there."
In April, Clare O'Connor (Second Year) presented her paper, "'Not Particularly Human At All': Listening to Tanya Tagaq," at the EMP Pop Conference in Seattle.
In June, O'Connor was Contributing Chair of a panel at the Cultural Studies Association conference in Philadelphia. The panel was titled "Keywords for Radicals" and featured contributors to her co-edited book of the same name.
Ruqin Ren (ABD) presented her paper “The Evolution of Knowledge Creation Online” at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference in Vancouver in June.
Nathan Walter (Third Year) and Yariv Tsfati, "Interactive Experience and Identification as Predictors of Attributing Responsibility in Video Games," Journal of Media Psychology.
Nathan Walter, Stefanie Demetriades (both Third Year) & Professor Sheila Murphy, “Involved, United, and Efficacious: Could Self-Affirmation be the Solution to California’s Drought?” Health Communication.
Nathan Walter, Stefanie Demetriades, Ruth Kelly & Traci Gillig (all Third Year), “Je Suis Charlie? The Framing of Ingroup Transgression and the Attribution of Responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo Attack,” International Journal of Communication.
Rong Wang (Ph.D. 2016), Wenlin Liu (Ph.D. 2016), and S. Gao, "Hashtag and information vitality in networked social movement: Examining hashtag co-occurrence patterns," Online Information Review.
Professor Patricia Riley, Rong Wang (Ph.D. 2016), Yuehan Wang (Second Year), and Lingyan Feng, "Global Warming: Chinese Narratives of the Future," Global Media and China.
Yu Xu (Third Year) and Jianbin Jin, "The hierarchy of influences on professional role perceptions among Chinese online journalists," Digital Journalism.
Yu Xu, "Modeling the adoption of social media by newspaper organizations: An organizational ecology approach," Telematics and Informatics.