Join us for research presentations from Annenberg School of Communication graduate students Junyi Lv; Hamsini Sridharna and Jeeyun Sophia Baik; Yunwen Wang and Mingxuan Liu; and Essence Wilson.

Presentations:

• Junyi Lv: Museums, collective memories, and energy transition
  Climate change and the U.S. commitment to decarbonization demand structural changes in energy industries and revitalization of the communities. In energy transition, museums not only preserve memories of local and global communities but also become paths to revitalization, typically associated with public education and tourism. Pulling threads from energy communication research, rhetoric in motu, and diffractive ethnography, I conducted fieldwork in three oil museums in California and Texas, to analyze public memories in transition in personal, professional, and public spheres.

• Hamsini Sridharna and Jeeyun Sophia Baik: Civil rights and silicon valley: Facebook and Airbnb civil rights audits as a co-regulatory governance mechanism?
  This study examines the Facebook and AirBnB civil rights audits. Hamsini Sridharan and Jeeyun Sophia Baik conducted interviews with civil society advocates and the auditor who worked on both processes to better understand the audit negotiations, the ways in which “civil rights” is understood in the platform context, and whether/how these audits are useful as governance tools.

• Yunwen Wang and Mingxuan Liu: “Our Saving Grace”: The social simulation game animal crossing’s restorative power during the COVID-19 pandemic
  In this study, Yunwen Wang and Mingxuan Liu combined computational and human strategies to evaluate the user experience and game effects of Animal Crossing, a social simulation game, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. They analyzed tweets (n = 25,435) and Reddit posts (n = 2,139) related to Animal Crossing using latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and content analysis. Results showed that users perceived the game to have helped compensate for the social interaction missed, and coped with pandemic-related loss and stress, suggesting an eight-category user experience typology.

• Essence Wilson: A comparative analysis on the ecological factors that contribute to Black college students’ mental wellness
  Essence Wilson is performing a comparative analysis on the ecological factors that contribute to Black college students’ mental wellness (i.e.,satisfaction, depression, anxiety). These factors include personal, interpersonal, organizational and structural factors within and outside their academic environment that influences their mental state including factors that negatively impact their mental state, and factors that positively impact it as well.