Award-winning author, journalist and social critic Afua Hirsch has been appointed the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Journalism and Communication. One of Britain’s most vibrant voices on international affairs, the politics of identity and issues related to social justice, Hirsch will share her multi-platform media expertise with USC Annenberg students in both Los Angeles and London.

Julia Adams knew she wanted to be in sports broadcasting from the first time she noticed a woman on the field interviewing players after a college football game. “I looked at my dad and was like, ‘That’s their job?” she recalled. “‘I want to do that when I grow up.’”

For Sophie-Marie Prime, when she watches the 80s teen movie Deadly Friend, exacerbation hits the moment Paul Conway blends the brains of his teenage crush with a robot. “Nobody has come up with this idea before,” he declares. What films like this perpetuate, she explains, is the Frankenstein trope or man’s inability to give birth and his subsequent appropriation of a women’s power to foster life. It also perpetuates objectification of women, she adds, because Conway is essentially turning a person into an object.

Los Angeles-area high school students learn about careers in communications, journalism and multimedia during a month-long summer academy.

Jasmine Espy has been named the 2018–19 recipient of the Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) Fellowship in Film Criticism, a program that supports the next generation of film critics. Espy, who is working toward her master’s in the Specialized Journalism (The Arts) program, started courses this July during the seven-week summer digital news immersion

“When I first started interrogating Google’s output, it was incredibly unpopular,” Safiya Noble said. “I got a lot of pushback from people in academia and people in industry who said, ‘Google is the peoples’ company.”

Cultural historian Josh Kun will be chair’s inaugural holder

The best part of a day of service? It usually turns into a day of learning and inspiration.