Happy New Year from the Department of Communication!
Awards
Several faculty, staff, and graduate students received prestigious awards.
- Professor Natalie Bazarova received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.
- Assistant to the Chair Kelli Carr won the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Classified Service. (Note that this is not an award for espionage as Natalie questioned. )
- Senior Lecturer Lauren Chambliss was awarded the CALS Robert H. Foote Mid-Career Teaching Award.
- Mann Instructional Librarian and Communication Graduate Student Ashley Shea received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Librarianship.
Media
Professor Natalie Bazarova was quoted in the Cornell Chronicle about a report issued by a multidisciplinary Cornell task force on artificial intelligence in research. Natalie was part of the task force and is quoted in the article.
Associate Professor Brooke Duffy was quoted in the New York Times article “The Envy Office: Can Instagrammable Design Lure Young Workers Back?”
Publications
Graduate Student Pengfei Zhao, Professor Natalie Bazarova, Dominic DiFranzo, Applications Programmer Winice Hui, Rene Kizilcec, and Associate Professor Drew Margolin, January 2024, “Standing up to Problematic Content on Social Media: Which Objection Strategies Draw the Audience’s Approval?,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Problematic content on social media can be countered through objections raised by other community members. While intended to deter offenses, objections can influence the surrounding audience observing the interaction, leading to their collective approval or disapproval. The results of an experiment conducted by the authors manipulating seven types of objections against common types of offenses indicate audiences’ support for objections that implore via appeals and disapproval of objections that threaten the offender, as they view the former as more moral, appropriate, and effective compared to the latter.
Associate Professor Brooke Duffy, Anuli Ononye, and Graduate Student Megan Sawey, December 2023, “The Politics of Vulnerability in the Influencer Economy,” European Journal of Cultural Studies. To better understand the risks involved with platform-dependent labor, this article draws upon in-depth interviews of social media influencers and content creators, sampled from across platforms, content niches and subjectivities. The authors’ analysis reveals that vulnerability is a structuring concept in the influencer economy—one that operates at multiple, often overlapping levels: personal vulnerability, social vulnerability, and platform vulnerability.
Postdoctoral Associate Joel Le Forestier, Elizabeth Page-Gould, Alison Chasteen, January 2024, “Identity Concealment May Discourage Health-Seeking Behaviors: Evidence From Sexual-Minority Men during the 2022 Global Mpox Outbreak,” Psychological Science. Sexual minority men who concealed their sexual orientations during the 2022 global mpox outbreak were less likely to get vaccinated against mpox. This may have been because people who conceal their identities miss out on learning about health resources that are specifically targeted towards their communities in the way that mpox resources were.
