We warmly congratulate our friend and colleague Professor Deen Freelon on his new appointment with the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication, where he will be the Allan Randall Freelon Sr. Professor of Communication. (The announcement includes Allan Randall Freelon Sr.’s story, which is well worth the read.)
With this transition, Deen will become a CITAP senior affiliate researcher and continue to work with CITAP faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students on questions regarding race, identity, and mis- and disinformation. We are excited about his new role as a bridge between the important research at the Annenberg School and CITAP.
We took this announcement as an opportunity to express how deeply grateful we are to Deen for his role in co-founding CITAP and shaping our shared research agenda over the past three and a half years. In that time, he built the Political and Civic Applications Division (PCAD) team, mentored four postdoctoral research fellows and many more graduate students, and made contributions to open-source research software that support work far beyond our center. Deen’s publications have helped define the field of mis- and disinformation studies. He is a rigorous scientist, a leader in his field, and an academic of international reputation. He is also an amiable colleague whose generosity with mentorship, in particular, is felt far and wide in academia and beyond.
Gary Marchionini said, “I first met Deen more than two decades ago when he was a Stanford undergraduate spending the summer in my lab at UNC. He was a creative and technically savvy contributor and I was delighted when he came to UNC as professor more than a decade later. Deen’s socio-technical perspective on media is inspiring and his contributions to the CITAP community and to the evolving field of social informatics have been foundational. I look forward to continuing to learn from and with him in the years ahead.”
Alice Marwick added:
“I’m proud to call Deen a colleague and friend. The work he’s done at CITAP has been foundational to the field, and I expect his future research to be similarly impactful – both in tandem with CITAP and at Penn.”
Daniel Kreiss noted, “It has been an honor to work alongside Deen researching disinformation in the context of social difference and social power – and I am very much looking forward to continuing this work in the years ahead.”
And as Deen himself adds, “CITAP has been my main intellectual community since I helped establish it in 2019, and I look forward to continuing to work with my colleagues there after my job transition.”
Become a CITAP affiliate
Want to be part of the CITAP affiliate community for the 2023-24 academic year? We’d love to have you! We welcome researchers whose subject matter and normative commitments align with our own. The affiliate community is open to graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, faculty, and professional researchers across a broad range of institutions, especially within North Carolina.
For this coming year, we have three goals for our affiliate program:
Promoting public scholarship and research translation efforts that help policymakers, civil society groups, and others better understand the impact of technology on our public lives.
Supporting graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early-career researchers navigating the challenges of doing interdisciplinary and publicly-engaged work.
Providing a community for researchers who could benefit from a broader network.
These goals inform our affiliate programming and are not intended to limit who should apply! (We also welcome well-connected senior researchers interested in sharing their time and talents, for example).
Publications and appearances
“[A search engine result] is increasingly becoming the end point and not the starting point… “It’s easy to want to put your trust in this quick answer, but these are not helpful librarians who are trying to give you the best resources possible.” Francesca Tripodi spoke with the Washington Post about how chatbot integration is changing search.
“In 2023, attention is currency. It gets you views online, which can get you booked on TV and interviewed in the media. Getting on TV might get you invited to conferences or noticed by a book agent or chosen as a conservative donor favorite. At the very least, being on television and speaking and being cheered by favorable audiences sound like more fun than driving on rural highways to have coffee chats with constituents who disagree with your thoughts on a minor local policy issue that even the local news does not — or cannot — cover.” Tressie McMillan Cottom continues to explore the appeal and implications of party-switching.
Coming soon
May 2-3: We’ll be at “Social Justice and Technological Futures,” hosted by the University of Tübingen. Registration is free.
May 25-29: We’ll be at the ICA conference in Toronto. Look for details about a CITAP/UNC Hussman/UNC Department of Communication happy hour event coming soon!
May 30: Release date for Alice Marwick’s The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media.
June 5: Deadline to apply to join the CITAP 2023-24 affiliate community.