Faculty

This semester, the Annenberg School for Communication’s Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC), led by Professor Marwan M. Kraidy, is welcoming its inaugural postdoctoral fellows, Rayya El Zein and Samira Rajabi, who will be at Annenberg for two years, as well as a new research fellow, Bülay Doğan.

Be the media. Know the media. Change the media.

This slogan, used by the Media Democracy Project in Canada, is how Des Freedman, Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, frames his intellectual journey. It’s a thread that connects both of this semester’s Scholars Program in Culture and Communication visiting scholars, Freedman and E. Patrick Johnson, the Carlos Montezuma Professor of African American Studies and Performance Studies at Northwestern University.

This semester, the Annenberg School for Communication, the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and other Annenberg research centers are welcoming 13 new visiting scholars and five new postdoctoral fellows. These visiting scholars and postdoctoral fellows will spend anywhere from one semester to several years researching and collaborating with Annenberg faculty, staff, and students.

Annenberg Professor Diana C. Mutz has won the 2017 Doris Graber Award from the American Political Science Association (APSA) for her book In Your Face Politics: The Consequences of Uncivil Media (Princeton University Press, 2015). This award recognizes the best book published on political communication in the last ten years.

Barbie Zelizer, the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has been named the 2017-2018 Rutman Teaching Fellow by the USC Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School, has been named a Fall 2017 Fellow by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, based at Harvard Kennedy School.

Jamieson, Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC), will explore the role of the press in reinforcing norms of democratic discourse during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Among the issues Jamieson plans to examine are:

Penn Media Scholars in China (PMSC), a new summer institute directed and led by Professor Guobin Yang, recently took eight Penn undergraduate students to Beijing and Hangzhou to study media industries, institutions, and citizens’ everyday media practices.

From June 5-30, PMSC gave students a first-hand understanding of the rapidly growing and developing media industry in China through site visits, interactions with media professionals, and conversations with students.

Journalism should be independent, transparent, unbiased, incorruptible, socially useful — a shiny marble pillar upholding the ideals of democracy.

Ideally, yes. But in reality, the fourth estate is part of a complicated and imperfect world. Journalism exists in stable democracies, fully authoritarian states, and everything in between. Media institutions are inextricably tied to politics, economics, law, education, security, religion, and the military.

Sixteen Annenberg faculty, students, and visiting scholars will present at the International Association for Media and Communication Research’s 2017 Conference, to be held July 16-20 in Cartagena, Colombia.

The presentations are listed below, and include room location in parentheses. All events are at the Cartagena de Indias Convention Center. For the full program, visit IAMCR’s conference website.

Monday, July 17

8:30 – 10:00

At the International Communication Association (ICA) 67^th Annual Conference, held in San Diego last weekend, Marwan M. Kraidy, Ph.D., the Anthony Shadid Chair in Global Media, Politics, and Culture and Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, received the Outstanding Book Award for his 10^th book, The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World (Harvard University Press).