Employment News
Graduate Student Pengfei Zhao has accepted a tenure-track assistant professor position in the School of Communication at Florida State University.
Events
On Monday, March 10, 2:55, Associate Professor Neil Lewis, Jr., is delivering an invited lecture entitled “From Individual Behavior to Collective Action: Behavior Change in the Climate Crisis” as part of the 2025 Perspectives on the Climate Change Challenge Seminar Series. This university-wide, zoom event is accessible from the lecture webpage.
Climate change is fundamentally a collective problem—the issue will affect everyone in some way. Because of this, behavioral scientists have studied a variety of ways to get people from a broad range of backgrounds to engage with the issue of climate change; they have done this in attempts to mitigate (or adapt to) the climate crisis. Some have taken individual-focused approaches that target individual level behavioral changes, others have taken more collective approaches, attempting to mobilize large groups of people. In this talk Neil will present research on the efficacy of these different strategies, and their implications for interventions and policies to address the climate crisis.
Please join us for COMMColloquium Monday, March 17, 3:00 pm, in 102 Mann Library Building. Associate Professor Neil Lewis, Jr., will present “Publicly Engaged Research in the 21st Century.” The colloquium is followed by a reception, located in The Hub of the Department of Communication.
On Monday, March 10, Associate Professor Claire Wardle will participate in an invited panel entitled “The Good, Bad and the Ugly: The Role of Generative AI in Undermining but (potentially) Rebuilding Trust.” The panel is part of the Building Trust in Science for a More Informed Future conference, a collaboration between the Aspen Institute Science & Society Program and MIT Press. The event takes place at MIT but will be livestreamed; registration is required. Claire’s panel is at 4:00 pm, but the all-day conference has multiple events that may be of interest.
Grants
Graduate Student Amanda Vilchez received a 2025 Cornell Atkinson Graduate Research Grant as Principal Investigator. The $4000 grant will support her research, entitled “Vampire Bat Guano: Exploring the Risks and Benefits of a Pre-Hispanic Tradition for Human-Bat Healthier Coexistence.” Her research seeks to map the implications of the traditional use of blood-feeding bats’ guano in the Sacred Valley (Peru) through an analysis of perceived and observed health and environmental benefits and risks. This participatory research will contribute to a more nuanced, culturally informed perspective on One Health, expanding the understanding of how different ways of knowing, as Indigenous epistemologies, see the interconnectedness between wildlife, humans, and the environment to shape the resistance, negotiation, or transformation of their traditions.
Publications
Graduate Students Roxana Muenster and Maggie Foster, February 2025, “Breadwinner or Breadmaker: Contradictions in Tradwives’ Creator Labor, Religious Vernacular, and Aesthetics,” AoIR 2024 Selected Papers of Internet Research.
The authors’ research, published in an extended abstract, examines how tradwives negotiate the tension between their entrepreneurial content creator labor and the traditional gender roles and lifestyle they advocate for.
Associate Professor Wunpini Mohammed, March 2025, “Afropolitanizing the Local: How Cultural Imperialism Is Rewriting the Narratives of African Entertainment Industries,” Cultural Studies.
Despite the growth in the globalizing force of African pop culture, there is not much research on what this means for Africa’s culture industries in the domestic and global front. Using postcolonial theory, the author presents analyses on the attention that Ghanaian and Nigerian entertainment media are getting globally. She argues that although African pop culture and entertainment media is being globalized more rapidly than ever before, it is imperative to pay attention to the way that this trend is coloured by the Western Gaze, cultural imperialism, afropolitan logics, and the displacement of African continental consumers and audiences of these culture industries.
