Faculty

Klaus Krippendorff delivered the keynote address at the Congress of the European Communication Association, March 24-27, 2003, in Munich, Germany.

Why has the public persisted in believing that violent crime is a widespread national problem in the U.S. despite declining trends in crime and the fact that crime is concentrated in urban locations? So ask authors Daniel Romer, director of the Institute for Adolescent Risk Communication, Annenberg Public Policy Center, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Professor and Dean, and Sean Aday (PhD, 1999) in the current issue of Journal of Communication (March, 2003, Volume 35, Number 1).

Jessica Fishman (Ph.D. 2001) and Professor Carolyn Marvin are co-authors of "Portrayals of Violence and Group Difference in Newspaper Photographs: Nationalism and Media" in the current issue of Journal of Communication (March 2003, Volume 53, Number 1). The authors analyze group membership of violent agents and types of violence in front-page photographs from 21 years of The New York Times. Using a trimodal definition of media violence, they confirm the hypothesis that non-U.S. agents are represented as more explicitly violent than U.S.

"Cradle," an 11-minute experimental dance video created by Assistant Professor Katherine Sender, Joe'l Ludovich, and Myra Bazell was screened as part of Ladyfest at the Painted Bride Arts Center, March 20th. It will also be shown as part of the Philadelphia Dance Project's Motion Pictures Festival at the Prince Music Theater on Saturday, March 29, at 7:30 p.m., and as part of the Philadelphia Festival of Independents at the Seaport Museum on Thursday, April 10, at 7:15 p.m.

The New York State Communication Association (NYSCA) invited Professor Klaus Krippendorff as key note speaker to its 60th anniversary annual conference, October 25-27, 2002 in Terrytown, New York. The theme of the conference was Imagining the Possible: Communication, Crisis, and Social Change. Drawing on this theme, Dr. Krippendorff's address, "The Possibility of Possibility," contrasted two paradigms of knowing: science and design. He suggested that in modernist science, possibilities and theories are incompatible.

On February 16 and 17, 2003, a most snowy Presidents' Day weekend, Dean Kathleen Hall Jamieson and David Eisenhower, Director of the School's Institute for Public Service, participated in a two-day National Presidential Tapes Conference at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston. The conference focused on the history of presidential taping systems and their impact on each president's leadership and legacy.

Research of Ph.D. candidate Lilach Nir and Professors Joseph Cappella and Vincent Price appears in two articles in a special issue of Political Communication (2002, volume 19, no.1) devoted to Campaign 2000.

"As Seen on TV: Health Policy Issues in TV's Medical Dramas" is the title of the report issued by Professor Joseph Turow and PhD candidate Rachel Gans, recipients of a Kaiser Family Foundation grant to study the presence and nature of health care images in medical shows on television. The report is the product of an extensive content analysis of every episode of every prime time doctor series in the 2000/2001 television season, a total of 74 shows.

Key findings include:

"A New Scholarly Dispensation for Civil Religion" by Professor Carolyn Marvin appears in a special issue of the Journal of Communication and Religion (March 2002) titled: Twenty-five Years After The Political Pulpit. Dr. Marvin explores what makes United States civil religion so compelling that citizen believers will offer their lives to it on well-defined ritual occasions. She proposes that U.S. patriotism is a full blown religion defined, like all religions, by a transcendent god principle with the authority to deal life and death to its own believers.

Professor Oscar Gandy delievered the second Dixons Public Lecture at the London School of Economics and Political Science, November 7, London, England. His talk, titled: "Data Mining, Discrimination and the Decline of the Public Sphere" was followed by a reception held in his honor.