September 24, 2025
Awards
Graduate student Rosie Nguyen received the Adam Smith Fellowship from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. This one-year fellowship is aimed at doctoral students from any university and discipline who are interested in political economy.
Events
Reminder: Please join us for COMMColloquium Monday, September 29, 3:00 pm, in 160 Mann Library Building. Postdoctoral Associate Bailey Flynn will present “Alternative Health Systems and Resilient Communication.” The colloquium is followed by a reception, located in The Hub of the Department of Communication.
Assistant Professor Wunpini Mohammed will give a talk on her book, Media, Culture, and Decolonization: Re-Righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana, as part of the Media Studies Colloquium. The event takes place on November 14, 12:00–1:30 pm, in 311 Uris Library.
By focusing on African language media in Ghana, such as film, television, and radio, Wunpini emphasizes the importance of espousing a decolonial politic and praxis in the process of co-creating knowledge with Indigenous communities. She connects the struggles of global majority countries and demonstrates the ways in which (neo)colonialism and imperialism impede the work toward liberatory futures. Her talk demonstrates the potential that African language media hold as tools of cultural and epistemological decolonization.
Grants
Graduate student Inhwan Bae received a $6000 Frank H.T. Rhodes Mission Grant from the President's Council of Cornell Women. She will use this grant to support her research on combating online toxicity against women and nonbinary persons with tailored persuasion messages using large language models.
Graduate student Sohinee Bera has been awarded a $5600 Waterhouse Family Institute Research Grant. Open to both faculty and doctoral students, the grant has an acceptance rate of less than 10%. The award will fund Sohinee’s dissertation exploring India's Integrated Child Development Services Program and the communicative roles of community health workers to investigate how institutional structures and everyday practices enable and hinder communicative marginalization.
Publications
Catherine Lambert, Katherine McComas, Dominic Balog-Way et al., September 2025, “The Uncanny Underground: Psychological and Cultural Associations of Subterranean Technologies for Climate Mitigation,” Energy Research & Social Science.
Perceptions of subterranean renewable energy technologies are shaped not only by technical and environmental considerations but also by deep-seated psychological and cultural associations with the underground. Drawing on a cross-national U.S.–Switzerland survey (N=2,031), the authors introduce the concept of the “uncanny underground” to capture how interpretations of the subsurface blur boundaries between the familiar and the strange, evoking both curiosity and unease. Understanding these diverse culturally embedded meanings provides valuable insight into how groups react to subterranean energy technologies aimed at addressing climate change.
