Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication

Jointly established by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, the center’s faculty and doctoral students seek to address emerging global issues broadly across the field of communication and media.

The first-of-its-kind center not only explores what “collaboration” means for the field of communication and media, but also provides critical infrastructure for reimagining and potentially revolutionizing how collaborative communication can be used to address complex issues such as health care, data privacy, cultural and demographic change, politics, new media, gender/racial equity and justice, media literacy and policy, journalistic trust, and the restructuring of media industries in an evolving age of streaming and networked distribution.

USC Annenberg and Annenberg Penn Professor Sarah Banet-Weiser — a leading scholar in feminist theory, race and the media, youth culture, popular and consumer culture, and citizenship and national identity — serves as the center’s director.

In the center’s inaugural year, we are working on programming, including:

• Collaborative research studies pairing faculty from both schools, as well as formalized interschool mentorship pairings for early-career scholars.
• Joint annual symposiums organized around a specific theme such as media policy or disinformation, and featuring collaborative research presentations.
• A methods summer school co-hosted by each institution that could strengthen the methodological sophistication of doctoral students at both schools.
• Expanding the Annenberg Summer Institute on Diversity in Media and Culture for doctoral students across the country to think critically about how communication-related concerns inform and impact issues of diversity and inclusion.
• A “study abroad”-type program in which doctoral students could reside for a semester at the other school, giving Penn students an opportunity to be closer to media and cultural industries in Los Angeles, and USC students an opportunity to be closer to political communication and news industries in Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, D.C.

Contact the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication at annccc@usc.edu.