Faculty

Public health messages often tell people things they don’t want to hear: Smokers should stop smoking. Sedentary people need to get moving. Trade your pizza and hot dogs for a salad with lean protein.

For many people, these messages trigger our natural defenses. They make us feel bad about ourselves and our choices, leading our subconscious to reject the healthy encouragement.   

As the 2018-2019 school year begins, six new visiting scholars and 15 new postdoctoral fellows are joining the Annenberg School for Communication, the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and several other Annenberg research centers. These scholars will research alongside and collaborate with Annenberg faculty, staff, and students for anywhere from one semester to several years.

Southern Africa has some of the highest rates of sexual assault in the world, with 20 percent of adolescent girls and boys reporting that they have been forced to have sex. In many cases, they are also the perpetrators: in one survey, 12 percent of boys and 5 percent of girls admitted they have forced someone else into sex.

Given that forced sex experiences are linked to increased rates for HIV, depression, suicide, substance use, and early pregnancy — and it is a problem that spans the globe — it is an area ripe for public health interventions.

When you see a McDonalds, you might think about the delicious-meets-unhealthy world of Big Macs and fries. But there is a whole strata of society that sees something else first: free internet.

These are the people that Julia Ticona studies: the low-income workers in America who scrape by juggling multiple minimum wage jobs and side hustles. For many, computers and reliable home internet can be unaffordable luxuries, making cell phones an essential lifeline to employers who may call them to work — and induce a childcare scramble — at any time. 

What role does social media play in the dissemination of news? Does social media have an influence on elections? Can social media impact American democracy?

These are questions academics have been asking in recent years, but to find definitive answers, researchers need full data access from a private company, like Facebook, and complete freedom to publish without company permission. Those two things do not usually come in one package.

The term “latte liberal” has been a popular way to disparage American progressives as uppity and out of touch, but does a person’s coffee preference really say something about their political ideology?

According to a new study, it does.

The wealthiest 1% of Americans own nearly 40% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 90% of families hold less than a quarter of it. Fewer and fewer corporations have more and more control over the content of American media. Tech companies like Uber, Postmates, and Caviar are making many people’s lives easier with the push of a button, yet the gig economy workers behind them often struggle to make ends meet.

The new Center for Media at Risk, led by Barbie Zelizer, will launch at Penn with a cross-disciplinary conference at Perry World House and the Annenberg School for Communication, April 19-21. The conference, “What is Media at Risk?,” will bring together media practitioners, scholars, and representatives from organizations that support media to share perspectives, examining political intimidation in the media, and how practitioners can resist it. 

Faculty Research Associate and Annenberg alumna Jessica Fishman (Ph.D. ‘01) is the recipient of the 2018 Everett Lee Hunt Award for Death Makes the News: How the Media Censor and Display the Dead (NYU Press). The award will be presented at the 2018 Eastern Communication Association (ECA) Convention later this month in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

More than 65 faculty, students, postdoctoral fellows, and research staff will present research at the International Communication Association’s 68th Annual Conference, to be held May 24-28 in Prague.