Annenberg School

Courses Offered During Summer Session 1: May 28 - July 3

COMM 125: Communication Behavior (Pawel Popiel and Celeste M. Wagner)

Annenberg doctoral candidate Elisabetta Ferrari will be presenting a talk titled, "Appropriation, Negotiation, Challenge: How the Technological Imaginaries of Contemporary Social Movements Respond to Silicon Valley." In her talk, Ferrari will ask: What is the political meaning of digital technologies for contemporary left-wing social movements? How do activists envision the role of technology in their struggles for social justice?

Hepeng Jia, Ph.D., (Cornell University) will present a talk titled, "When Science Controversies Encounter Political Opportunities: Comparing GMO, Hydropower, and Nuclear Power Contentions in Contemporary China."

Please RSVP here if you plan to attend the talk. 

On Wednesday, March 20, at noon, Professor Joe Turow of the Annenberg School will give the next talk in the UPenn Libraries Speaker Series of 2019/20. 

Our society faces a critical juncture. On one hand, we are in a moment of rapid technological advancement that creates greater communication, information sharing, and numerous democratic possibilities. On the other hand, we see a collapsing commercial model for journalism, monopolistic platforms that spread misinformation with little accountability, more economic insecurity, and a debased political process.

About the Talk

"Affordances of Queer Dating Apps and the Potential for Queer Worldmaking in Urban China"

This talk analyzes the spaces of media access and censorship at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. It first touches on the U.S. military’s use of movie theaters to entertain and regulate the employees and families stationed at the site, and explores how official guidelines strategically limit which films can be screened. Next, it discusses the more restricted media exhibition contexts for detainees, interrogating how the military instrumentalizes detainees’ access to entertainment as a means of further ensuring their compliance.

Piotr Szpunar (Ph.D. '14), Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, University at Albany-SUNY. He will be talking about his new book, Homegrown: Identity and Difference in the American War on Terror (NYU Press, 2018).

New digital technologies are remaking the way we live, changing the way passengers and goods move and services are provided. They hold out the hope of numerous benefits for consumers and cities by making transactions more efficient while increasing accessibility, variety, and convenience for consumers. At the same time, it is clear these outcomes won’t automatically come about without the right policies in place to guide their development and adoption. As a result, numerous debates have arisen around how to ensure that the costs and benefits of these new technologies are equitably shared.

About the Talk

"Fraud, Hacking, and Stupid Voters: How Partisan Media Contribute to Delegitimizing Election Narratives"