Every summer from the time he was seven through 16 years of age, Ernest Owens would travel from his hometown of Houston to Marianna, Arkansas, where he would spend three months with his grandmother. She had grown up in the small town just an hour and a half east of Little Rock and “knew her way around town,” Owens said. She could walk into any room — any situation — and leave with a new friend. This is what she wanted for her grandson.

Emmanuel Martinez freely admits to something that would have been shocking in the world of journalism not too long ago: He’s good at math.

Allissa Richardson’s decade-long research on using mobile devices to report on social movements and police violence led to her new book, Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism.

As Hollywood tallies its year-end totals, a new study released Feb. 5 offers insight into how gender and race/ethnicity of the lead/co-lead character is related to economic success.

When a student schedules an appointment with USC librarian Chiméne Tucker, they usually meet in her office in the Doheny Memorial Library. Along with the expected bookshelves, the room welcomes students with herbal tea, coffee, and a light scent of orange and lavender from an aromatherapy oil infuser — all signs that Tucker realizes there’s more to her job than books, databases and citations. “I call it research therapy,” she said.

Driving down Highway 62 on the way to Joshua Tree National Park, Francisco, one of the 20 high school students on the bus, noticed something different about the landscape. If he ever moved here, he told the group, he’d open up his own roadside taco stand, like the ones near his home in South Los Angeles. That way, he’d give people a taste of where he’s from.

Josh Kun, professor and Chair in Cross Cultural Communication, talks about the act of listening. In this short video, the award-winning cultural historian and expert on the intersection of arts, culture and politics shares how his focus on music extends to performative lectures, books he has written, a collaboration with the Los Angeles Public Library and a popular undergraduate communication course he teaches.

Stephen D. O’Leary, a former associate professor of communication at USC Annenberg known for his scholarship on religion and media, as well as his love of choral music, has died. Suffering from liver cancer, he passed away on Jan. 24, according to his family. He was 60 years old.