Friends and family react as graduates walk across the stage accepting their Communications degrees during the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism commencement on May 15, 2015.
USC Annenberg/ Brett Van Ort

Recent Doctoral Student Publications, Presentations and Awards

Laura Alberti (ABD) presented her paper, “Holocaust denial as conspiracy argument,” during the 2015 NCA/AFA Alta Argumentation Conference in Alta, Utah.

Dayna Chatman (ABD) had her paper, “Pregnancy, Then It’s ‘Back to Business’: Beyoncé, Black Femininity, and the Post-Feminist Gender Regime,” published in Feminist Media Studies.

Samantha Close (ABD) had her paper, “The Political Economy of Creative Entrepreneurship on Digital Platforms: Case Study of Etsy.com,” accepted for the proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, to be held in January of 2016.

Ignacio Cruz (First Year) had his papers, “It’s time to put down the iPhone: Social capital, ICT use, and overload in organizational meetings” and “What happens between meetings? Using ICTs and face-to-face communication to continue the meeting conversation and build social capital” accepted to the NCA Conference in Las Vegas, to be held in November.

Renyi Hong (ABD) won a top student submission award from the Digital Asia Hub at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University for his essay, “The Digital Good Life in Asia’s 21st Century.” The essay will be published as part of a collection of the same name, and he will receive a substantial cash award along with an invite to attend the Digital Asia Hub launch in Hong Kong.

Jillian Kwong (First Year) had her GIFTS (Great Ideas for Teaching Students) paper, “‘The Name Game’: An Activity to Help Students Understand the Power of Self-Concept, Identity Formation, Reflected Appraisal, Interpersonal Expectancies, and the Perceptual Processes of Interpersonal Communication,” accepted to the NCA Conference in Las Vegas, to be held in November.

Alex Leavitt and Josh Clark (both ABD) had their paper, “Uses of Multiple Characters in Online Games and Their Implications for Social Network Methods,” accepted to the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing Conference, to be held in San Francisco in February and March of 2016. The paper will be published in the CSCW 2016 journal proceedings.

Melina Sherman (Third Year) published an article in the International Journal of Communication titled “The Cultural Production of a Pharmaceutical Market: The Making of ADHD.”

Rong Wang (ABD) had an article (co-authored with Sora Tanjasiri, Paula Palmer, and Tom Valente), “Network Structure, Multiplexity, and Evolution as Influences on Community-Based Participatory Interventions,” accepted for publication in the Journal of Community Psychology.