Spring/Summer 2017 PhD Student Publications, Presentations, & Awards

Marcia Allison (ABD) has been accepted as an Emerging Scholar to the 2017 Milton Wolf Seminar: The Marshall Plan and the Yearning for Transformative Visions.

Sophia Jeeyun Baik (First Year) had her paper, “LGBT Representation of Webtoons: Parasocial Contact Hypothesis, Familiarity and Interaction,” accepted for presentation at the NCA 103rd Annual Convention in Dallas in November.

Lik Sam Chan (ABD)

• “Who uses dating apps? Exploring the relationships among trust, sensation-seeking, smartphone use, and the intent to use dating apps based on the Integrative Model,” Computers in Human Behavior (accepted for publication). 

• “Emerging Currents in Communication/LGBTQ Studies: A Review of LGBTQ-Related Articles Published in Communication Journals from 2010 to 2015,” International Journal of Communication

• Quoted by Apple Daily (Taiwan) on the use of dating apps: "A Guide to Online Dating"

Lik Sam Chan (ABD), Yao Sun (Fourth Year), Yusi Xu (Third Year), and Professor Margaret McLaughlin were awarded the top interactive paper award in the Health Communication Division at the ICA conference in San Diego for their submission entitled “Acculturation to both American and Chinese Cultures Predicts Condom Use Intent Among US-Dwelling Chinese/Taiwanese MSM.”

Samantha Close (PhD 2017) accepted the tenure-track faculty position of Assistant Professor of Digital Communication and Media Arts at DePaul University, starting in fall 2017.

Ignacio Cruz (Second Year)

• Review of Stefana Broadbent, Intimacy at Work: How Digital Media Bring Private Life to the Workplace, International Journal of Communication

• Awarded the Top Student Paper Award and the Top Four Paper Award for his paper, “Social Pan-Africanism: Expanding the #FeesMustFall Movement Across a Networked Africa,” in the Global Communication and Social Change Division at ICA.

Stefi Demetriades (Third Year) and Grace Yuehan Wang (Second Year) were both accepted to the 2017 Annenberg-Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute.

Michelle Forelle (ABD) was awarded Top Student Paper by the ICA Communication and Technology division for her paper, “Technological Exceptions to the Legal Rule: Property Rights in the Fight Over Ownership of Vehicle Software.”

Traci Gillig (ABD)

• Review of Stephen T. Russell and Stacey S. Horn (Eds.), Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Schooling, International Journal of Communication

• Received the Richard Cone Graduate Engaged Research Award from USC Dornsife’s Joint Educational Project (JEP)

• “More Than a Media Moment: The Influence of Televised Storylines on Viewers’ Attitudes Toward Transgender People and Policies,” with Erica L. Rosenthal, Professor Sheila Murphy, & Kate Langrall Folb, Sex Roles (in press)

Kristen Guth (PhD 2017) 

• “Finding the Diamond in the Rough: Exploring Communication and Platform in Crowdsourcing Performance,” with Professor Daren Brabham, Communication Monographs (accepted for publication)

• “The Deliberative Politics of the Consultative Layer: Participation Hopes and Communication as Design Values of Civic Tech Founders,” with Professor Daren Brabham, Journal of Communication (accepted for publication)

• Accepted a Postdoctoral Teaching Scholar position (Organizational Communication) in the Department of Communication and Risk & Disaster Communication Center, College of Information and Communication at the University of Kentucky.

Renyi Hong (PhD 2017) was awarded Top Student Paper in the Philosophy, Theory and Critique division of ICA for his paper, “Gamification and compassionate imagination.”

Hyun Tae (Calvin) Kim (Second Year) had his paper, “Perceptions of Change, Ethnicity, and Immigration Attitudes in Brexit,” accepted for presentation in the “New Research on the Brexit Vote” panel at the 2017 American Political Science Association (APSA) annual conference.

Lauren Levitt (Second Year)

• “Batman and the Aesthetics of Camp,” Sontag and the Camp Aesthetic: Advancing New Perspectives, Eds. Bruce E. Drushel and Brian M. Peters, Lexington Books, 2017.

• Presented her paper “’Birds of the World Unite!’: Non-Human Others and the Return of the Oppressed” at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference in San Diego in April.

• Her short film, Confetti, was accepted to the Southern Margins Film Festival and screened at Clemson University.

• Reviewed The Wedding Plan for LA Ciné Salon.

• Two performances at the Super Future exhibition on July 29 at Lot 613 in the Arts District.

Nathalie Maréchal (ABD)

• Review, “Making Sense of Communication Power and the New Information Warfare,” International Journal of Communication

• “Are You Upset About Russia Interfering With Elections? If so, you should also worry about Russia’s domestic surveillance, and internet governance policy, and more,” Slate

• “Global Equality in Your Pocket: How Cheap Smartphones and Lax Policies Leave Us Vulnerable to Hacking,” Global Voices Advocacy

• Quoted by Consumerist about the 2017 Corporate Accountability Index, which was published by Ranking Digital Rights in March. She’s been involved with RDR since her 2014 COMPASS fellowship; more recently, she developed the conceptual framework behind RDR’s “mobile ecosystem” research and analysis.

• “Networked Authoritarianism and the Geopolitics of Information: Understanding Russian Internet Policy,” Media and Communication’s special issue on Post-Snowden Internet Policy (accepted for publication). 

• “How ICT companies operate vis-à-vis human rights issues and the repertoire of company-oriented advocacy,” with Sarah T. Roberts (UCLA), Internet Policy Observatory at the University of Pennsylvania

• Invited talk on her paper, “Networked Authoritarianism and the Geopolitics of Information: Understanding Russian Internet Policy,” at Central European University in Budapest. 

• Presented her paper, “Corporate Accountability for a Free and Open Internet” (with Rebecca MacKinnon and Priya Kumar) at the International Studies Association conference in Baltimore.

• Invited participant in an academic workshop on propaganda and media manipulation, hosted by Data & Society in NYC.

• Moderated a roundtable discussion on doing company-oriented research and advocacy at RightsCon.

Nathalie Maréchal (ABD), Kate Miltner (Third Year), Yao Sun (ABD), and Yusi Xu (Third Year) were all accepted to the Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme.

Kate Miltner (Third Year) 

• Quoted in “Want to Profit Off Your Meme? Good Luck if You Aren’t White” from the March issue of Wired.

• Quoted and her research featured in a Good Magazine article on the co-incidental rise of the alt-right and popularity of dog memes: "Why Did The Internet Fall Out Of Love With Cats?"

• Gave a talk at the V&A Museum’s “The Meme Life” event on June 30 in London: “From LOLcats to Good Dogs: Connecting Animal Memes and American Politics.”

Clare O’Connor (Second Year) presented her paper, “Justin Bieber’s Revelation: The Cultural Politics of Christian Authenticity” at Pop Conference 2017: Sign O’ The Times: Music and Politics at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle in April.

Ruqin Ren (Third Year) and Bei Yan (ABD) had their paper, “Crowd Diversity and Performance in Wikipedia: The Mediating Effects of Task Conflict and Communication,” accepted for the 2017 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, to be held in Denver in May. 

Emily Sidnam-Mauch (Second Year) had her paper, “Mobile Social Networking Site Usage, Load Theory, and Distracted Walking Consequences,” selected as one of the top-ranked papers for the Mobile Communication Division at the ICA conference in San Diego.

Nathan Walter (Third Year)

• “Each Medium Tells a Different Story: The Effect of Message Channel on Narrative Persuasion,” with Professor Sheila Murphy, Lauren Frank, & Lourdes Baezconde-Garbanati (USC Keck), Communication Research Reports (accepted for publication)

• “The Strength of Bridging Social Capital: The Case Study of Normative Behavior, Latinas, and Cervical Cancer,” with Professor Sheila Murphy, Lauren Frank, and Professor Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Communication Research Reports (accepted for publication). 

• “To Walk a Mile in Someone Else’s Shoes: How Narratives can Change Causal Attribution through Story Exploration and Character Customization,” with Professor Sheila Murphy & Traci Gillig (Third Year), Human Communication Research (accepted for publication). 

• “On the Boundaries of Framing Terrorism: Guilt, Victimization, and the 2016 Orlando Shooting,” with TJ Billard (Second Year) & Professor Sheila Murphy, Mass Communication & Society 

• Top Paper, ICA Ethnicity and Race Division, “Who Cares What Others Think? The Role of Latinas’ Acculturation in the Processing of HPV Vaccination Narrative Messages,” with Professor Sheila Murphy, Lauren Frank, & Lourdes Baezconde-Garbanati (USC Keck).

• Second place at the GSG Graduate Research Symposium, “How to Unring the Bell: A Meta-Analytics Approach to Debiasing of Misinformation."

Grace Yuehan Wang (Second Year), Review of Jonathan Donner, After Access: Inclusion, Development, and a More Mobile Internet, International Journal of Communication

Grace Yuehan Wang (Co-PI; Second Year), Jingyi Sun (First Year), Yiqi Li (First Year), and Kristen Guth (PhD 2017), with PI Professor Patricia Riley, have obtained a grant for a collaborative project with colleagues from Shanghai Jiao Tong University on Chinese and U.S. entertainment start-ups.

Leah Liyuan Wang (First Year), “Verbal Stigmatization from Family: How Does that Affect Latino Men Who Have Sex With Men?” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (accepted for publication)

Andrea Wenzel (PhD 2017)

• Her white paper report, “Curious Communities: Online engagement meets old-school, face-to-face outreach,” was published by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, with an accompanying article in the Columbia Journalism Review. She was interviewed about the report for the It’s All Journalism podcast.

• “Engaging Stigmatized Communities Through Solutions Journalism: Residents of South Los Angeles Respond,” with Daniela Gerson, Evelyn Moreno, Minhee Son, & Breanna Morrison, Journalism 

• Appointed Senior Research Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University in February.

• Has accepted a position as an assistant professor of journalism at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communications.

Sarah Myers West (ABD)

• “Survival of the Cryptic,” Limn

• “Data Capitalism: Redefining the Logics of Surveillance and Privacy,” Business and Society

• Invited speaker on Surveillance, Censorship and Human Rights Online at the Conference “Decoding the Digital Debate,” hosted by the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

Yu Xu (Third Year)

• Book review, Expertise, Communication, and Organizing, Journal of Communication

• “Examining Collective Memory Building in Wikipedia: A Multilevel Network Approach,” with Yusi Li & Li Qi, Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

• “Political inequalities start at home: Parents, children and the socialization of civic infrastructure online,” with Kjerstin Thorson & Stephanie Lynn Edgerly, Political Communication. (accepted for publication)

Larry Zhiming Xu (Third Year), Review of Chun Wei Choo, The Inquiring Organization: How Organizations Acquire Knowledge & Seek Information, International Journal of Communication

Chi Zhang (ABD)

• “Bounding and bonding community: Ethnic diversity and the ethic of inclusion in hyperlocal news,” Journalism (accepted for publication)

• In collaboration with Alhambra Source/Metamorphosis Project, and in partnership with Asian Americans Advancing Justice, was awarded a Tow Center for Digital Journalism Fellowship to assess misinformation in the immigrant Chinese news ecology and explore intervention strategies.

Sulafa Zidani (First Year), Limor Shifman, & Lihi Yariv-Laor were awarded Top Paper by the ICA Popular Communication division for their paper “Represented Dreams: Subversive expressions in the Chinese blogosphere as alternative symbolic maps.”