April 8, 2026
Awards
Graduate student Rosie Nguyen received the Diverse Knowledge East Asia Fellowship from the Einaudi Center for International Studies. The fellowship is part of the East Asia Program’s Area Studies Fellowships, which support graduate students whose work focuses on East Asia. The award provides funding for one semester, including a stipend, tuition support, and health insurance, and is designed to advance research and scholarship in the region.
Graduate student Sarah Salman received the Summer Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities from the Digital CoLab, sponsored by the Cornell University Library and the Cornell Society for Humanities. The fellowship supports graduate students pursuing innovative research at the intersection of technology and the humanities, providing funding and resources to develop digital projects that expand scholarly methods, enhance public engagement, and explore new forms of knowledge creation.
Events
Join us for COMMColloquium Monday, April 13, 2026, at 3:00 p.m. in 102 Mann Library Building, featuring Philip Napoli, Distinguished Lecturer and Professor at Duke University. His talk, titled “From Patron to Persecutor: The Evolution of the U.S. Government’s Role in Disinformation Research,” will explore the shifting relationship between government institutions and disinformation research. The colloquium will be followed by a reception in the Hub of the Department of Communication.
Lectures
Professor Bruce Lewenstein delivered an invited talk on March 24, hosted by the Centre for Media, Culture, and Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Co-sponsored by the Pain Commensuration Technology Lab at York University and the Centre for the Study of the United States at the Monk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, the talk was titled “Science Communication in a Diverse World.” Bruce explored how increased attention to diversity and inclusion in science communication brings new complexities, particularly as differing knowledge systems can challenge efforts to promote public understanding of science. He examined how these tensions intersect with identity, politics, and moral perspectives.
On April 15, Assistant Professor Wunpini Mohammed will speak on the panel Art + Feminism 2026: Data Feminism. The event takes place 4:30–6:00 p.m. in 107 Olin Library. Hosted by Cornell University Library, this event is part of the global Art + Feminism Wikimedia initiative, which aims to address information gaps on Wikipedia and Wikidata and has been supported by Cornell for more than a decade. The panel, centered on the theme “we need feminist data to tell feminist stories,” will explore topics including information justice, feminist data praxis, and the intersections of art and knowledge production.
On March 30 and April 2, Assistant Professor Danny Parker presented talks at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research. Danny’s first talk, co-led with Abby Qin, “Advocating against Environmental Racism: A Survey-Experiment on Message Framing and Public Opinion,” highlighted one of a series of studies from the Communication Addressing Poverty lab’s Community Voice Project. The study showed that Black women in an economically marginalized community understand environmental risk not as an isolated issue, but as part of a broader constellation of harms rooted in the legacy of systemic racism. Danny’s second talk, “Outcast Citizen: Poverty, Police, Press, & Radical Disengagement in American Communities,” drew on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in low-income communities to advance a political communication framework showing how inequality shapes shared meaning, information environments, and political identity. She introduced “radical disengagement” as a communicatively constituted response to deprivation, in which shared narratives of neglect and persecution foster distrust in media and government, reshape political identities and norms, and reinforce non-participation alongside alternative forms of social and political order.
Media Coverage
Graduate student Amanda Vilchez was featured in the Committee on Data of the International Science Council (CODATA) Blog in the article “‘Nothing about Us without Us’”: Reflections from the CODATA Task Group on Citizen-Generated Data for the SDGs.” The piece highlights global efforts to advance citizen-generated data in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, emphasizing the importance of community participation in data production and policy. Amanda contributed to the Latin America and Caribbean section, which explores how participatory science initiatives are helping address data gaps and amplify the voices of marginalized communities in regional and global decision-making.
Publications
L.F. Domingo, Research Associate Sarah Gilbert, Y. Cao…K. Shilton, February 2026, “Care, Wisdom, and Civics: Value Sensitive Design of Large Language Model Support for Online Moderation,” ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.
This study conducts a value-sensitive design process with volunteer moderators of two heavily moderated subreddits (history Q&A and legal advice). Through an empirical investigation using iterative interviews and a conceptual investigation centered in virtue ethics, the researchers find moderators center values of care, wisdom, and civics in their work. A technical investigation then matches these values to the known capabilities and limitations of LLMs.
Lab Manager Isabelle McLeod-Daphnis, R. Simpson…Associate Professor Andrea Stevenson Won, March 2026, “Patient Input on the Design of a Social Virtual Reality Environment for Hospitalized Older Adult Trauma Patients: Phase 1 of a Usability, Acceptability, and Feasibility Pilot Study,” Digital Health.
This study represents Phase 1 of a pilot study exploring the design of a social virtual reality (SVR) environment for hospitalized older adult trauma patients, a population that often faces challenges with pain management and social isolation. Researchers presented several existing SVR platforms to patients, conducted in-depth interviews, and used this feedback to iteratively refine and develop an SVR test environment for use in a second phase of the study. Early feasibility indicators showed participant interest and engagement and provided insights to guide refinements for Phase 2 deployment; patients reported that the environments could provide distraction, support social interaction, and promote calming emotions, and suggested improvements such as more realistic nature elements and additional interactive features.
