March 18, 2026
Events
REMINDER: Join us for COMMColloquium Monday, March 23, 2026, 3:00 pm, in 102 Mann Library Building. Graduate student Bya Rodrigues will present “Resisting Networked Misogyny: Platformized Activism, Care Infrastructures and Algorithmic Visibility.” The colloquium is followed by a reception located in The Hub of the Department of Communication.
Lectures
On March 12, Associate Professor Neil Lewis, Jr., presented a talk titled “What Laws Can—and Cannot—Do about Bias in the Mind” at the Cornell Law School Colloquium on Psychology and Law. In the talk, Neil discussed his research on how the history of discriminatory laws and policies in the U.S. created segregated social contexts that continue to affect social biases in modern life. He also presented research documenting that attempts to change those biases with light-touch interventions, such as short diversity trainings, have limited effects. After explaining why that is the case, he ended with more optimistic studies that have found that changes in policies that create more diverse and inclusive social environments reduce biases and improve intergroup relations in the long run.
Media Coverage
Assistant Professor Wunpini Mohammed published an excerpt titled “Television Must Assist in the Socialist Transformation of Ghana” from her forthcoming book, Media, Culture, and Decolonization: Re-righting the Subaltern Histories of Ghana, in The Massachusetts Review. The piece explores the development of television in Ghana and how it was shaped by President Kwame Nkrumah’s vision of media as a tool for education and social transformation. It also examines how structural inequalities limited access, particularly in Northern Ghana, and how contemporary media institutions have diverged from these original goals.
Professor Bruce Lewenstein was interviewed on the Coalesce podcast episode, SciComm Conversations: “Does Public Engagement Make Science Better?” Recorded in May 2025 and released this week, the episode explores Bruce’s work examining whether public engagement influences scientific research itself—and why that question is so difficult to test.
Publications
Graduate student Xuan Qian, January 2026, “Across Borders through Screens: Health Information-Seeking Practices of Chinese abroad on Rednote,” Global Perspectives in Communication.
How do Chinese migrants navigate digital health information when living abroad? This study examines why many still turn to Rednote, a Chinese social media platform, instead of Google or other local resources for health inquiries. Based on interviews with Chinese migrants across multiple countries, the findings show that Rednote offers more than information: it provides cultural familiarity, emotional reassurance, and a sense of community trust. Through these affordances, Rednote plays a vital role in migrants’ health information-seeking and decision-making, helping them adapt to unfamiliar healthcare systems overseas.
