November 4, 2026
Events
Reminder: Join us for COMMColloquium Monday, November 9, 2026, 3:00 pm, in 102 Mann Library Building. Graduate student Margaret E. Foster (Maggie) will present “Signs, Stock, and Staff: How Indie Bookstores and Social Reading Platforms Produce Queer Literary Counterpublics.” The colloquium is followed by a reception located in The Hub of the Department of Communication.
Invited Lectures
Professor Brooke Duffy participated in a panel entitled “Defining a Discipline: Researching the Creator Economy” at Syracuse University’s ‘Cuse Creator Con. Panel members addressed what it means to study the creator economy as a serious academic field and discussed the questions, methods, and challenges of making it a discipline.
On October 28, Associate Professor Neil Lewis, Jr., presented the lecture “Meaning Making in a Fragmented Democracy” at Northwestern University’s Media, Technology, and Society Distinguished Speaker Series.
The United States is what political scientists call a “fragmented democracy,” a nation in which unequal social systems structure the opportunities different groups have access to across multiple domains of life. In this talk, Neil presented research on how fragmentation affects people’s physical and mediated access to information about a variety of social issues and the implications for how they make meaning of those issues. He ended with recent evidence-based strategies for building shared understanding and mobilizing people from many walks of life to engage in collective action to address some of the underlying sources of social fragmentation.
Media Mentions
Graduate students Roxana Mika Muenster and Margaret E. Foster were cited in the Der Spiegel article “The Trad Wife Who No Longer Wants to Be One.” The article discussed the findings of their article “Breadwinner or Breadmaker: Analyzing Contradictions in Tradwife Creators’ Entrepreneurial Labor, Political Ideology, and Digital Self-Presentation” published in Creator and Influencer Studies.
