Studying the role of communication in politics, adolescent behavior, child development, health care, civics, and mental health; helping policy-makers, journalists, scholars, constituent groups, and the general public understand the role that media play in their lives.
Research Centers, Labs, and Groups
Collaborative research is common at the Annenberg School, often taking place through our established centers and labs, as well as through a variety of more informal research working groups. Learn more about these research entities below.
CAMRA is an interdisciplinary collective of researchers and educators committed to participatory, experimental media-making, engaging in projects and workshops that use multimodal representation to push knowledge production in new directions.
An institute of advanced study that aims to produce world class, field-defining research, grounded in a vision of “inclusive globalization” that embraces bottom-up actors and the stunning diversity of global media, politics and culture.
The mission of the Center is to develop and evaluate theory-based, culturally sensitive, and developmentally appropriate strategies to reduce health-risk behaviors, and to identify ways to implement HIV risk reduction and health promotion interventions.
The Center for Media at Risk is devoted to fostering free and critical media practice and scholarship. The Center will provide a hub for practical and scholarly discussions of the global media environment and how its practitioners work under threatening political conditions.
Taking an interdisciplinary communication neuroscience approach to link neural activity to behaviors at the individual, group, and population levels. Much of the work focuses on health communication and the design of better interventions, programs, and policies.
At the DiMeNet group we analyze how we interact, communicate, and organize by reconstructing the behavioral traces we leave online, applying tools developed in the fields of network science, data mining, and computational sociology.
Engaging undergraduate students in a public service dialogue through a special program combining individual research opportunities with hands-on experiences in the public arena. Students meet with and learn from current and former public office holders, journalists, and public servants.
The Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics promotes research on the many ways citizens interact with the political world. Much of ISCAP’s research focuses on public opinion, political psychology, and political communication.
The Observatory's goal is to deepen the reservoir of researchers and advocates in regions where Internet freedom is threatened or curtailed and to support the production of innovative, high-quality, and impactful internet policy research.
A collaborative, interdisciplinary space at the intersection of media studies and social movement theory, the Media Activism Research Collective (MARC) links students with peers, scholars and resources to foster deep learning and insightful research on activism, social movements and media.
MIC is a joint venture between Penn's Annenberg School and Rutgers University. It is committed to studying the political economy of social problems, media, and democracy, while engaging local activist projects and drawing connections with national and international social movements.
Using mathematical models and online empirical methods to study collective behavior, research in the group focuses on how social and institutional changes can have unexpected effects on collective political, social, and health outcomes.
The Peace and Conflict Neuroscience Lab aims to put science to work for peace by using the tools of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience to (1) characterize the processes driving conflict, such as empathy and dehumanization, and (2) empirically evaluate peacebuilding efforts.
Communication about tobacco products has been transformed by the digital marketing revolution and the rapid diffusion of emerging social media, leaving product information and misinformation readily available. Penn TCORS works to separate fact from fiction about tobacco products.
The Scholars Program in Culture and Communication is a forum dedicated to thinking about critical social and scholarly issues that lie at the intersection of culture and communication.
Members are interested in the production and circulation of media materials and/or their policy implications. They share research ideas, engage in with visiting industry executives and policymakers, and meet regularly to discuss issues of theory, method, and current events.