Quick Links
Research
- Research centers and archives
- Faculty research presentations
- Faculty awards and fellowships
- Graduate research awards and fellowships
- Undergraduate research
Spotlight on research: Roger Simpson
Roger Simpson is the Dart Professor of Journalism and Trauma and from 2000-2006 was the founding director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. Simpson has studied how journalists are affected by traumatic situations. This video shows a training exercise for journalism students, that allows them to interact with actors in a traumatic scenario. Simpson's book Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical Reporting about Victims and Trauma, written with William Cote, was published by Columbia University Press in 2006. The unedited version of the video is also available >>
Research centers and archives
Several exciting research centers and archives are affiliated with the Department of Communication and our faculty:
The Center for Communication and Civic Engagement
The Center for Communication and Civic Engagement is dedicated to research, the creation of citizen resources and student-designed learning experiences that develop new areas of positive citizen involvement in politics and social life. The Center's primary focus is to understand how new information technologies can supplement more traditional forms of communication to facilitate new forms of civic engagement.
The Global Citizen Project grew out of student and faculty research at the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement. This site gives an overview of the emerging activities of global citizens who are changing the nature of politics both nationally and internationally. This site contains resources, links and original research to help better understand this growing and significant trend.
The Dart Center
Dart Center West is a satellite office of The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma based at Columbia University in New York. The Dart Center is a global network of journalists, journalism educators and health professionals dedicated to improving media coverage of trauma, conflict and tragedy. The Center's University of Washington-based office directs academic programs and West Coast activities.
The Digital Media Working Group
The Digital Media Working Group explores the cultural, social, political, and aesthetic elements of digital media and is organizing a lecture series comprised of scholars, artists, and technologists working in the field. The Digital Media Working Group has become an important regional institution for presenting new research, exploring art, and meeting experts from industry and public policy. The group holds events several times a quarter and draws people from industry, arts and across the University: the Department of Communication, Technical Communication, the Information School, Digital Arts, and more. Guest speakers include faculty and advanced graduate students from the social sciences and humanities across all three campuses, but also include visiting academics and leaders from regional IT, gaming, design, and communications industries.
The Excellence in Student Journalism Archives
The Excellence in Student Journalism Archives document the work and achievements of our exemplary journalism students.
The Urban Archives Project
The Urban Archives Project seeks to create a conversation between scholars, artists and activists interested in a variety of issues related to communication in public spaces.
World Information Access Project
The World Information Access Project (www.wiaproject.org) is an international team of researchers dedicated to investigating global trends in technology distribution, information security, and personal privacy. The researchers look for practical ways to improve equity in information access and for ways to use communications technologies to improve the quality of our economic, political, and cultural lives.
Featured faculty research presentations
John Hammerback, UW Affiliate Professor of Communication, spoke on Oct. 30, 2008, on "The Rhetorical Career of César Chávez."
The fact that César Chávez relied heavily on his incessant rhetorical campaign throughout his career and had extraordinarily powerful effects on audiences has often been overlooked; even less understood is how Chávez achieved those effects. Yet Chávez was a savvy rhetor who placed his discourse at the very center of his fabled career.
Based on his work in such books as The Rhetorical Career of César Chávez and The Words of César Chávez, Hammerback discussed Chávez's startling transformation of some audiences and persuasion of others probed the communication dynamics that induced many to support his demanding agenda for union activism. The Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies sponsored the event.
Christine Harold, assistant professor, presented a colloquium on "Motherhood is the Necessity of Invention: Rhetoric, Politics, and Play" on April 8, 2009. Inspired by her recent studies on the consumer culture of associating objects with market brands and her own experience as a mother of three children, Harold advocates using the “play” model in the fields of parenting, academics, and politics. Read more >>
Dr. Malcolm Parks, professor, delivered the Thomas M. Scheidel Annual Faculty Lecture “Deeply Connected: The Science of Personal Relationships and Networks” on On April 29, 2009.
The quality of our personal relationships profoundly influences our satisfaction, our health, and our ability to accomplish life goals. In this talk, Professor Parks advances a social contextual theory for understanding how personal relationships are initiated and develop within social networks. Research in this perspective illuminates several basic questions about human relationships including: Why do we meet the people we do? Why do some meetings initiate relationships, while others do not? How is the development and stability of relationships linked to the larger networks people inhabit? Read more >>
Faculty Research Awards and Fellowships
W. Lance Bennett’s MacArthur Foundation grant was renewed until August 2009. The Civic Learning Online Project studies the kinds of civic skills young citizens may acquire from online engagement sites such as RockTheVote and MyBarackObama. The qualities of online learning opportunities are compared with more formal civic education offered in schools. This project has employed five Communication research assistants, along with a number of undergraduates. It links to a parallel project funded by Surdna running through June 2009. The Surdna grant is for developing digital media civic skills training online, and supports the Becoming Citizens undergraduate internship program run by the Center for Communication & Civic Engagement.
David Domke and former B.A. and M.A. student Kevin Coe received the Top Article of the Year Award from the Political Communication Division at the NCA conference. The award is for their article in Journal of Communication, “Petitioners or Prophets? Presidential Discourse, God, and the Ascendancy of Religious Conservatives,” which formed a foundation for their 2008 book, The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America (Oxford University Press). Coe is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Arizona.
Kirsten Foot’s book Web Campaigning (with Steve Schneider) (MIT Press, 2006) was awarded the 2008 Doris Graber Outstanding Book Award by the Political Communication Section of the American Political Science Association. The 2008 Doris Graber Outstanding Book Award honors the best book published on political communication in the last 10 years.
John Gastil received an NSF grant to study an ongoing Citizens Parliament deliberative process in Australia. The study will provide short-term educational benefits to the post-graduate, graduate, and undergraduate students involved in this research project. The study’s greatest social impact, however, is the insight it will lend to those hoping to design deliberative and effective hybrid decision-making processes for large-scale organizations and political units. Whether the results of this research validate or call into question the particular design developed in Australia, its findings will aid the development of face-to-face and online technology that yields collective choices in ways that simultaneously maintain process integrity and generate decision legitimacy.
Christine Harold received a Royalty Research Fund award in 2008. The award will support research on the remaining case studies of Harold's second book, De/signing Rhetoric: Mass Consumption and Environmental Sustainability in the "Age of Aesthetics." The book looks at the relationship between industrial design, mass consumption, and environmental sustainability through a series of case studies about different ways people consume material goods. The first, a study of Target and IKEA's claims to "democratize design" is in a recent edition of the journal Public Culture. The remaining cases will look at the recycled culture and eco-design movements and their historical antecedents.
Ralina Joseph received a prestigious 2009 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Award. The fellowships will provide support for the development of a second book project, Speaking Back: How Black Women Resist Post-Identity Culture.
Ford awards 20 postdoctoral fellowships, which provide one year of support for individuals engaged in postdoctoral study after the attainment of the Ph.D. or Sc.D. degree between 2001 and 2008.
Postdoctoral fellowships are awarded in a national competition administered by the National Research Council (NRC) on behalf of the Ford Foundation. The awards are made to individuals who, in the judgment of the review panels, have demonstrated superior academic achievement, are committed to a career in teaching and research at the college or university level, show promise of future achievement as scholars and teachers, and are well prepared to use diversity as a resource for enriching the education of all students.
This is her second major national award in 2009, following the 2009 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty. The fellowship is operated by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation at Princeton University. Joseph is one of 20 scholars chosen nationally. The award carries funding support for research, brings recipients to campus for a retreat, and includes substantial mentoring by senior scholars.
Malcolm Parks was named the 2008 winner of the distinguished Miller Book Award for the Interpersonal Communication Division of the National Communication Association for his 2007 book, Personal Relationships and Personal Networks. The Miller Award honors the best book written in interpersonal communication within a five-year period.
Roger Simpson received the 2008 International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies Frank Ochberg Award for Media and Trauma Study. This award was established in 2003 to recognize significant contributions by clinicians and researchers on the relationship of media and trauma. Simpson is the sixth recipient of this highly prestigious award. Simpson is the author of Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical Reporting about Victims and Trauma and the founding director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.
Crispin Thurlow spoke by invitation at the Third International Roundtable on Discourse Analysis at City University of Hong Kong. Thurlow presented a paper, “The Price of Play: Creative License and New Media Discourse,” which ties in with his July 2009 special issue of the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication on the theme of young people and communication technologies.
Doug Underwood's book, Journalism and the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700-2000 was recently released by Cambridge University Press in 2009.
Graduate research and fellowships
Tabitha Hart received a 2009 Fritz Fellowship to support her research in Communication. The Fellowship comes from the Chester Fritz endowment, which was established to support international study or research by UW graduate students in the social sciences and humanities. Hart was awarded a research grant of $2,500 in 2008 by the Bridges Center for Labor Studies to research intercultural customer service.
Madhavi Murty received a 2009-2010 Simpson Center Dissertation Fellowship Award for “Textures of Representation: Stories of Neoliberalism and the Gendered Subaltern in Postcolonial India.”
Undergraduate research
2009 Jody Deering Nyquist Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Research
Angeline Candido
Title: Seattle Freeze
Area: Communication & Culture
Margitte Kristjansson
Title: The Fat Suit
Area: Rhetoric and Critical Studies
Nancy Pham
Title: Don’t Sell Your Children
Area: International Communication
12th Annual UW Undergraduate Research Symposium (2009)
Kristy Hogue: “Thick passports, thin excuses: Debunking the neocolonial myth of tourist contact.” Mentor: Professor Crispin Thurlow.
Camile Elmore: “New face, post race? The politics of mixed race identity and the emergence of post-race discourse.” Mentor: Professor Ralina Joseph.
Seungwha Lee: “Googling race and gender: Decoding the digitization of Asian women.” Co-mentor: Professor LeiLani Nishime.
Joshua Hubank: “Praise, blame and advocacy: An examination of President George W Bush’s post-9/11 discourse and rhetorical genres that define it.” Mentor: Professor Leah Ceccarelli.
Angeline Candido: “The Seattle Freeze: An ethnographic study of discourse surrounding a local social phenomenon.” Mentor: Professor Gerry Philipsen.
Nancy Pham: “‘Don’t sell your children’: An analysis of framing by anti-trafficking organizations.” Mentor: Professor Nancy Rivenburgh.
Alyssa Goldberg and Tiffany Martin: “Peace activism and media: A clash of values.” Mentor: Professor Nancy Rivenburgh.
