Awards
We are pleased to announce that Professor Katherine McComas received the Excellence in Risk Communication Research and Practice Award from the Society for Risk Analysis Risk Communication Specialty Group. The award recognizes “outstanding contribution during the previous year to the scholarship and/or practice of risk communication.”
Congratulation to Assistant Professor Neil Lewis, Jr., who was inducted into the 2023 Thinkers50 Radar class. Awarded by Thinkers50 (in collaboration with Deloitte), it recognizes 30 up-and-coming thinkers whose ideas we predict will make an important impact on management thinking in the future.
Events
Join us for COMMColloquium this Friday, February 10, at 2:00 pm. Jamila Michener will present “Navigating Complex Systems of Inequality: How Local Organizations Build Knowledge and Power.”
Grants
Assistant Professor Nathan Matias, PI, “Building the Public Technology Leadership Collaborative”: The $11,000 New Ventures Fund will support CAT Lab, one of the founding members of the Public Tech Leadership Coalition. The Coalition is a circle of research centers that engage deeply with U.S. federal regulators on technology policy issues through salons that they co-host with scientists with the goal of helping regulators and researchers understand how each thinks about evidence and incubating ideas about research that could serve society.
Assistant Professor Andrea Stevenson Won, Co-PI (with JoAnn Difede and Weill Cornell), “Piloting Virtual Reality Environments to Treat PTSD in Healthcare Workers Consequent to the COVID-19 Pandemic”: The $75,000 grant, funded by a Multi-Investigator Seed Grant (and internal Cornell grant), will fund the collaborators in piloting personalized virtual reality experiences to address PTSD in health-care workers consequent to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ph.D. Candidate Yiwei Xu, PI (with Professor Jeff Niederdeppe) received a $30,000 NSF Doctoral Dissertation Grant. Her dissertation research tests and extends inoculation theory by incorporating selective exposure. This research offers risk communicators theory-informed guidance on how to better employ an inoculation strategy to communicate with audiences in today’s high-choice media environment. Findings also shed light on the effects of risk messages among members of the public who hold a wide range of preexisting issue positions for controversial risk issues.
In the Media
Associate Professor Brooke Duffy was quoted in the NBC News article “TikTok’s’ ‘Scar Girl’ Doesn’t Care if You Think Her Scar Is Real or Fake.”
Publications
Kaylee Kruzan, Janis Whitlock, Julia Chapman, Aparajita Bhandari, and Professor Natalie Bazarova, January 2023, “Young Adults’ Perceptions of 2 Publicly Available Digital Resources for Self-injury: Qualitative Study of a Peer Support App and Web-Based Factsheets,” JMIR Formative Research. This study aimed to understand young people’s experiences with a peer support app and web-based factsheets and to disentangle potential explanatory mechanisms associated with perceived benefits and harms. Kaylee is a recent Ph.D. graduate, and Aparajita is a current Ph.D candidate.
Adjunct Associate Professor Tarleton Gillespie, “Do Not Recommend? Reduction as a Form of Content Moderation,” August 2022, Social Media + Society. Public debate about content moderation has overwhelmingly focused on removal: social media platforms deleting content and suspending users, or opting not to do so. However, removal is not the only available remedy. Reducing the visibility of problematic content is becoming a commonplace element of platform governance. Platforms use machine learning classifiers to identify content they judge misleading enough, risky enough, or offensive enough that, while it does not warrant removal according to the site guidelines, warrants demoting them in algorithmic rankings and recommendations. This essay documents this shift and explain how reduction works and raises questions about what it means to use recommendation as a means of content moderation.
