Contributors to Volume IV
Carolina Acosta-Alzuru is Associate Professor at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia. She received her doctorate from the University of Georgia. Her scholarship focuses on the links between media, culture, and society and bridges the disciplines of cultural studies, women's studies, and international media studies as she examines media texts, their production, and reception. She is the author of the book Venezuela es una Telenovela (2007). Her research has been published in Journalism and Mass Communication Monographs, Journal of Communication, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Popular Communication, Communication Review, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Mass Communication and Society, and other journals.
Linda Aldoory is Associate Professor of Communication and Affiliate Faculty in Women's Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her doctorate from Syracuse University in 1998. Her research focuses on gender, power, and diversity in health communication and public relations. In addition to her research and teaching, Linda Aldoory consults for various health and social service agencies, including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Homeland Security. She has been the recipient of research grants from the Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition and from the US Department of Homeland Security. She has won several top research paper awards and is co-editor of The Gender Challenge to Media: Diverse Voices from the Field. Her research has been published in Journal of Communication, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Communication Yearbook, Journal of Public Relations Research, and Public Relations Review.
Fernando Bermejo is Associate Professor of Communication at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. He is also Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, Massachusetts, where he was faculty fellow in residence during the 2009/10 academic year. Fernando holds a PhD from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and an MA from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Internet Audience: Constitution and Measurement (007) and editor of On Communicating: Otherness, Meaning, and Information (2010).
Shelley-Jean Bradfield teaches courses in media studies in the Department of Communication Studies at Central College, Iowa. Her research interests incorporate global media cultures; television in South Africa; media institutions, text, and audience studies; feminist theory, race/ethnicity/gender/sexuality, and media; media ethnography, cultural studies, and postcolonialism. Her work has been published in African Studies, Communication, Culture and Critique, and Television and New Media. This chapter is part of her dissertation, the first book-length project to examine the four main areas of television in South Africa: industry, production, text, and reception.
Matt Briggs is Senior Research Officer at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. His research is currently focused on audience research and media ethics, with particular reference to identity, journalism, and new media. He has recently published Television, Audiences and Everyday Life (2009), in which these questions are pursued.
Sunitha Chitrapu is Lecturer in Communications Research Methods at the Social Communications Media Department, Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai. She graduated in 2008, with a PhD in mass communication from the Department of Telecommunications, Indiana University, Bloomington, and with a specialization in media economics. Her research interests include the economics of the international media trade, piracy, and media policy issues.
Chua Beng Huat is Provost Professor, Department of Sociology and Cultural Studies in Asia Research Cluster Leader, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. For almost a decade he has been researching and organizing academic events in the area of East Asian Pop Culture. His publications in cultural studies include Life Is Not Complete Without Shopping; as editor, Consumption in Asia: Lifestyles and Identities, Elections as Popular Culture in Asia; and, as co-editor, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader (2007) and East Asia Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave. He is a founding and co-executive editor of the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.
Deborah S. Chung is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky. She received her doctorate from Indiana University, Bloomington in 2004. Her research focuses on the changing dynamics between communication professionals and their audiences through emergent information communication technologies (ICTs) and further examines ways in which ICTs empower information consumers. She has studied the concepts of interactivity, participatory communication, and convergence – particularly how they operate in the online journalism environment.
Lynn Schofield Clark is Associate Professor and Director of the Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media at the University of Denver. She is a sociologist who employs interpretive methods to explore the role of the media in social change. Her publications include From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (author, 2003), which received the Best Ethnography Award from the National Communication Association; Parenting in the Digital Age (author, forthcoming); Media, Home, and Family (co-author, 2004); and Religion, Media, and the Marketplace (editor, 2007). She teaches courses in journalism, media and culture, and qualitative research methods.
Fabienne Darling-Wolf is Associate Professor of Journalism in the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University, Philadelphia. She also teaches and supervises graduate students in the school's Mass Media and Communication Doctoral Program. Dr. Darling-Wolf's research focuses on processes of mediated cultural influence and negotiation in a global context, paying particular attention to how such processes intersect with gendered, racial, and ethnic identity formation. Her most recent work has been published in Communication Theory, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journalism & Communication Monographs, Journalism Studies, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, and Feminist Media Studies.
Brenda Dervin is full Professor of Communication and Joan N. Huber Fellow in Social and Behavioral Sciences at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. She specializes in teaching philosophy of methodology and in-depth interviewing, and has been working on the development and implementation of sense-making methodology for 35 years. She holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki, Finland, and she earned her graduate degrees from Michigan State University and her undergraduate degree from Cornell University.
Meenakshi Gigi Durham is full Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. Her work centers on gender, sexuality, identities, and media, which she approaches from a critical/cultural studies and feminist perspective. Her research has appeared in numerous leading journals in communication and media studies. Her most recent book is The Lolita Effect. She is also the co-editor, with Douglas M. Kellner, of Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks. She has conducted ethnographic work with adolescent girls and she regularly teaches graduate-level courses in qualitative methods in media studies.
Radhika Gajjala (http://personal.bgsu.edu/~radhik) is Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies and Director of Women's Studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. Her book Cyberselves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women was published in 2004. She co-edited South Asian Technospaces and Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice and is currently working on a single-authored book entitled Technocultural Agency: Production of Identity at the Interface.
Christine L. Garlough is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interests revolve around the areas of rhetorical theory, feminist theory, and critical social theory. Her work with grassroots feminist groups in India and in diasporic South Asian communities in the US has focused on the use of performance to make rhetorical claims about issues of social justice and human rights. This research, combining ethnographic fieldwork and rhetorical analysis, has been published in outlets such as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Journal of American Folklore, and Women's Studies in Communication. Her interest in human rights has led to her involvement in the Mellon Grant Workshop “Time, Poetics, and the Ethics of Testimony” and in a Faculty Development Seminar on “Migration and Diaspora” sponsored by the UW-Center for Humanities. She is affiliated with the Center for South Asia, the Folklore Program, the Theater and Drama Department, and the Human Rights Initiative.
Lelia Green is Professor of Communications at Edith Cowan University, in the School of Communications and Arts, and a co-chief investigator with the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. She has been the first chief investigator on three ARC Discovery Grants and on four ARC Linkage Grants. She has supervised nine PhD projects and one Masters by Research (MbR); and she is currently supervising eleven others. She has examined twelve PhDs and six MbRs for nine Australian universities. Lelia is the author or co-author of over 80 refereed articles, book chapters, and conference papers and co-editor of Framing Technology: Society Choice and Change (1994). She has also authored The Internet: An Introduction to New Media (2010) and Communication, Technology and Society (2002; also co-published as Technoculture: From Alphabet to Cybersex, 2002).
Donell Holloway is Adjunct Lecturer in the School of Communications and Arts at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia. She is an experienced ethnographic researcher working on the groundbreaking Australian Research Council (ARC) discovery project “Family Internet: Theorising Domestic Internet Consumption, Production and Use Within Australian Families,” as well as on other qualitative research projects. Her current research interests include media consumption in the context of everyday family life; and also retirement, leisure, and everyday life. Donell is author or co-author to over 20 refereed articles, book chapters, and conference papers.
Vamsee Juluri is Professor of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco and the author of three books: Becoming a Global Audience; The Mythologist: A Novel; and The Ideals of Indian Cinema.
Antonio C. La Pastina (PhD 1999, University of Texas at Austin) is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University. His research focuses primarily on the ethnographic investigation of audiences' engagement with media texts. He is currently working on a manuscript analyzing his decade and a half of ethnographic work in rural Brazil examining the relationships between television, the Internet, and social transformation. He has published extensively on telenovelas, audiences, and ethnographic methodology, with periodical forays in issues of representations of non-mainstream populations. His work has appeared in Critical Studies in Media and Communication; Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media; Gazette; and Qualitative Inquiry (among other journals).
Hongmei Li is Assistant Professor in International Communication at the Department of Communication, Georgia State University. She obtained her PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California. She also conducted a two-year George Gerbner postdoctoral fellowship at the Annenberg School for Communication, the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests center on advertising and consumer culture, national branding, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, gender and sexuality, the culture of new communication technologies, and political and cultural transformations in Chinese society. In addition to book chapters in multi-author volumes, she has published in Communication Theory, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Public Relations Review, and International Journal of Communication.
Patrick D. Murphy is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications and Mass Media at Temple University. He teaches global communication, media critical theory, and Latin American media and has published on the topics of the media and globalization, ethnographic method, and Latin American cultural theory. Currently he is working on a book about media, globalization, and the environment.
Radhika Parameswaran is Professor in the School of Journalism and Adjunct Faculty in the Cultural Studies and India Studies programs at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Her research and teaching interests focus on feminist cultural studies, globalization and postcolonial theory, qualitative research methods, and South Asia. She has published her research in leading journals in communication and cultural studies and has contributed several chapters in edited volumes on global media and feminist media studies. She is also the recipient of three outstanding teaching awards from the School of Journalism.
Jennifer Rauch is Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication Studies at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her PhD in mass communication at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she was a Chancellor's Fellow. Her research interests include alternative and independent media; audience studies; social movements and media activism; activist uses of media; rituals of circulation and consumption; independently published zines; the philosophy and practice of slow media; and resistance to new communication technologies. She has published articles examining the reception of mainstream news messages by activist audiences, rituals of circulation and interaction in the zine community, the role of alternative media in affirming group identities, and the diffusion of the “slow media” concept through press and popular discourse. Her work has appeared in Media, Culture and Society; Discourse and Communication; Journal of Communication Inquiry; Journalism and Mass Communication Educator; Mass Communication and Society; Popular Communication; and Social Movement Studies.
CarrieLynn D. Reinhard is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at the Dominican University, Illinois. She received her PhD in communication from the Ohio State University. Her research focuses on the application of Dervin's sense-making methodology to reception studies of newer media such as the Internet, digital games, and virtual worlds, as well as on the moment-by-moment sense-making and everyday recodings of traditional media, such as film and television.
Kim Christian Schrøder (http://www.ruc.dk/komm/Ansatte/vip/kimsc/) is Professor of Communication Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. His books include The Language of Advertising (Blackwell, 1985, co-author); Researching Audiences (2003, co-author); Media Cultures: Reappraising Transnational Media (1992, co-editor and contributor); and Digital Content Creation (2010, co-editor and contributor). His current research deals with news consumption in the media landscape of the digital age and with methodological issues around the quantitative/qualitative divide. He is chair of the division “New Media Genres, Media Literacy, and Trust in the Media” in the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action “Transforming Audiences – Transforming Societies.”
Katherine Sender is Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of the book Business, not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market (2004) and of many articles on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) media and marketing. She is currently combining her interests in queer and gender studies and in popular television and consumer culture, through a large audience research project focusing on makeover reality shows: Makeover Shows and their Audiences (forthcoming). She is also the producer, director, and editor of a number of documentaries, including Off the Straight and Narrow: Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and Television (1998), and Further Off the Straight and Narrow: New Gay Visibility on Television (2006).
Dhavan V. Shah is Maier-Bascom Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His interests focus on the social psychology of communication influence, and especially on effects on personal evaluations, political judgments, health outcomes, and civic engagement. Shah has developed programs of research on (a) the capacity of mass and interpersonal communication, particularly the Internet, to encourage community building and participation in civic and health contexts; (b) the influence of news framing and priming on cognitive complexity, attitude formation, and public opinion; and (c) the relationship of media use with the intersection of consumer and civic culture. Articles presenting this work appear in leading communication and political science journals. He has been principal investigator or project leader on grants and awards totaling over $1,500,000 and a part of securing over $11.1 million in grant funding at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Shayla Thiel-Stern is Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where she teaches coursework on digital media and culture. Her book, Instant Identity: Adolescent Girls and the World of Instant Messaging, was published in 2007; other work has appeared in Women's Studies in Communication, Girlhood Studies, and in multi-contributor volumes such as Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations of Girls' Media Culture, edited by Mary Celeste Kearney (2011). She is currently writing a book about media-generated moral panic and teenage girls in the United States over the past century. Shayla Thiel-Stern received her PhD in mass communication from the University of Iowa.
Kim Trager-Bohley is Lecturer at the Institute for American Thought, Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis. Her research interests include the history of the book, media globalization, Southeast Asian print cultures, and ethnographic methods. Her research has been published in Mass Communication and Society, Communication Review, Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, and Asian Journal of Communication.