Ph.D. graduates pose for photographs for their family and friends after receiving their degrees on May 14, 2105 at the USC Annenberg School for Communication Doctoral Hooding Ceremony.
Ph.D. graduates pose for photographs for their family and friends after receiving their degrees on May 14, 2105 at the USC Annenberg School for Communication Doctoral Hooding Ceremony.
© USC Annenberg; Photo Credit: Brett Van Ort

Spring 2016 Ph.D. Student Publications, Presentations, & Awards

Matthew Bui, Ignacio Cruz, and Yuehan (Grace) Wang (all First Year) presented at the International Network for Social Network Analysis Sunbelt Conference in Newport Beach.

Matthew Bui and Emily Sidnam (both First Year) have been accepted to an ICA preconference with a paper co-authored with Ellen Helsper of LSE.

Josh Clark (ABD) and Christina Hagen (Third Year) presented their paper, “Twitter Conversations about ISIS: Bridging Social Capital in the Networked Caliphate,” in a poster session at the International Network for Social Network Analysis Sunbelt Conference in Newport Beach.

Ignacio Cruz (First Year) is the recipient of a 2016 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Sandra Evans (Ph.D. 2014) and Christina Hagen (Third Year) have had their paper, “Developing Foresight Capacity: Sensemaking about the Future in Public Media Organizations,” accepted for presentation in a divisional session at the 2016 Academy of Management Meeting taking place in early August in Anaheim.

Perry Johnson (Second Year) presented at the Gender and Music: Practices, Performance, Politics conference at the Örebro University School of Music, Theatre and Art in Örebro, Sweden. Her presentation was titled “Sing Along? Lyrical Representations of Gender in No. 1 Songs on the Billboard Hot 100.”

Alex Leavitt (ABD) was featured in Pacific Standard magazine’s list of “30 Thinkers Under 30.”

Nathalie Marechal and Sarah Myers West (both ABD) have been invited to participate in Hackademia, a summer program on empirical studies on computing culture held at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany.

Nathalie Maréchal (ABD) is currently a Senior Fellow in Information Controls at Ranking Digital Rights. As part of her fellowship, she attended the Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia, Spain and RightsCon in San Francisco. At both conferences, she led sessions on the role of ICT companies in enabling government surveillance and restrictions on free expression worldwide, and on how civil society activists can push back against this private governance of the public sphere.

Maréchal was also accepted to the ICA preconference on “Algorithms, Automation, and Politics” and to the Communication and Technology Division’s Doctoral Consortium.

Kate Miltner (Second Year) was interviewed for an article in The Atlantic on Reaction Videos.

Sarah Myers West (ABD) co-wrote "Unfriending Censorship: Insights from Four Months of Crowdsourced Data on Social Media Censorship," a report from the Electric Frontier Foundation and onlinecensorship.org.

Myers West also participated in an Open Tech Fund workshop on Internet company policy at the Internet Freedom Festival. She also presented ongoing research on company content moderation practices at RightsCon and participated in the joint Annenberg-LSE Symposium. Her paper, "Data Capitalism: Redefining the Logics of Surveillance and Privacy," was accepted into ICA and was accepted into the Communication and Technology Doctoral Consortium at ICA. Also at ICA, her paper, “Breakage and Repair in Internet Governance Institutions: Examining Public Debate at NetMundial,” was accepted into the preconference “Power, communication, and technology in Internet governance.”

Deborah Neffa Creech (First Year) received an honorable mention for her 2016 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship proposal.

Clare O’Connor (First Year) co-edited Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle. The collection explores the words that shape our political landscape. Each entry highlights a term’s contested variations, traces its evolving usage, and speculates about what its historical mutations can tell us.

Jieun Shin (ABD), Professor Lian Jian, Kevin Driscoll (Ph.D. 2014), and Professor Francois Bar, "Political rumoring on Twitter during the 2012 US presidential election: Rumor diffusion and correction," in New Media & Society.

Nathan Walter (Second Year) co-authored a paper entitled “Brain Imaging Paradigm Shows Promise for Attentional Focus Research: A Feasibility Study Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging” with Jasmin Alves, Hilary Dorton, and Andrew Hooyman. It has been accepted to the upcoming North American Society for Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity (NASPSPA) conference.

Yuehan (Grace) Wang (First Year) was awarded the Frank Andrews Fellowship for the 69th Annual Summer Institute in Survey Research Techniques at the University of Michigan.