Pictured left is Senior Lecturer Michelle LaVigne announcing the winners. Students left to right: Hannah Lewis; Richard Ballard; Tabares Erices, James Hoehner, Hannah Rader, Brook Diamond, Avery Look.
Conference Presentations
Associate Professor Brooke Duffy was an invited panelist as last week’s symposium on “Academe in the Age of Social Media: Scholarly Inquiry at Risk?,” which was held at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. Brooke spoke about the risks of academic self-promotion amid wider structures of precarities.
Honors
Assistant Professor Nathan Matias was appointed to the Human Development Report Advisory Board, an independent group of development experts and industry leaders tasked with guiding the writing and advocacy of a forthcoming report. Board members will advise on the thematic and policy considerations to help world leaders better understand the challenges and benefits of technology and artificial intelligence for future human development.
Lectures
Graduate student Roxana Muenster presented a paper at Ofcom (UK media, communication, and technology regulator), as part of their “Disrupting Digital” seminar series. In her paper, entitled “The Far Right Internet: Commerce, Conspiracy, and Culture,” Roxana discussed the intersection of the alt.-health and far-right online, specifically as it relates to lifestyle politics and conspiracy.
Media Coverage
Professor Bruce Lewenstein was quoted by the University World News in the report “Cut out the Jargon When Communicating Basic Science,” an article about the recent Communicating Discovery Sciences symposium, where Bruce delivered a plenary talk.
Publications
“Effects of Cohesion with Teammates on Division-I Student-Athletes’ Mental Health: An Application of the Human Need to Belong and Transactional Stress Frameworks,” G. Cranmer, Emma Cox…and L. Holbert, August 2024, Communication & Sport. This study examines the relationship between team cohesion and student athletes’ anxiety and depression. We researchers tested whether team cohesion directly reduces anxiety and depression (i.e., predicted by the Human Need to Belong perspective) or whether team cohesion reduces stress, which in turn reduces anxiety and depression (i.e., predicted by the Transactional Theory on Stress and Coping (TTSC). The researchers found that stress mediated the relationship between task (but not social) cohesion and mental health, supporting TTSC and suggesting that for student-athletes, performance concerns outweigh relational ones.
