CITAP: The 2023 Tour
Highlighting the CITAP research community and research outputs throughout the year.
We’ve reflected on internal CITAP successes and highlights in our weekly newsletter throughout the year, such as:
We are taking a break this week from our regular content to highlight a few of the books and papers published, new career steps, and awards and honors received by those in our affiliate community.
Finally, we wanted to say thank you to our readers who return each week to learn about what we are doing here at CITAP. Make sure you are connected with us on all platforms— we have some exciting events coming next semester you will not want to miss 👀
Enjoy this holiday season, and we will return with more Round-Ups in the new year.
-Felicity
📝Publications
📚Books
Daniel Kreiss, along with co-authors Ulrike Klinger and Bruce Mutsvairo, published a new textbook “Platforms, Power, and Politics: An Introduction to Political Communication in the Digital Age” (Polity). They trace the transformation of political communication in the aftermath of digital technology’s explosive development and widespread adoption and is the first textbook to center digital platforms in understanding political communication.
Tori Ekstrand was the lead author on a newly published and significantly revised media law textbook “Trager's The Law of Journalism and Mass Communication.”
Alice Marwick wrote and published “The Private is Political” from Yale University Press. She offers a “new way of understanding how privacy is jeopardized, particularly for marginalized and disadvantaged communities—including immigrants, the poor, people of color, LGBTQ+ populations, and victims of online harassment.”
Sharrona Pearl’s book, “Do I Know You,” was published on November 28th (John’s Hopkins University Press). It was also covered in the Washington Post, discussing how “[Sharrona] doesn’t shy away from the dangerous outcomes of harnessing facial recognition… ever since facial recognition technology came along in the 1950s, the humans who manage its databases have demonstrated that it can be leveraged toward racist and eugenicist ends.”
Lee McGuigan published his book, “Selling the American People: Advertising, Optimization, and the Origins of Adtech” (MIT Press). CITAP also hosted Lee for a book talk on September 7th.
📄Papers/ Articles
Emily Mendelson published her first article, “Sensemaking and public intimacy on TikTok: How viral videos influence interpersonal relationships offline”, in New Media and Society.
Amanda Reid’s paper, co-authored with Noelle Wilson, “Data Controllers as Data Fiduciaries” is forthcoming in the University of Colorado Law Review.
Sananda Sahoo published 2 papers: “Biometric Data’s Colonial Imaginaries Continue in Aadhaar’s Minimal Data” (BJHS Themes) and “India’s Internet Shutdowns as Biopolitics” (Critical Studies in Media Communication).
Brian Creech published “Venture Philanthropy, Local News, and the Murky Promise of Innovation” in Media and Communication.
Katie Furl co-authored “Comparing Perceived Disruptiveness and Effectiveness of Protest Tactics” which was published in Socius.
Cindy Ma published “Thinking for Themselves: Bootstraps Discourse and the Imagined Epistemology of Reactionary YouTube Audiences” in Political Communication.
Larissa Doroshenko was instrumental as a guest editor in the special edition of Journal of Information Technology & Politics, “Digital media, democracy and civil society in Central and Eastern Europe”. She also published in the same journal an article, “Like, Share, Comment, and Repeat: Far-right Messages, Emotions, and Amplification in Social Media.”
Waqas Ejaz, along with co-authors, published the “Climate Change News Audiences: Analysis of News Use and Attitudes in Eight Countries” as part of the Oxford Climate Journalism Network.
Shannon Malone Gonzalez and co-author, Faith Deckard, published “We Got Witnesses” Black Women’s Counter-Surveillance for Navigating Police Violence and Legal Estrangement” in Social Problems.
Lee McGuigan also coauthored 3 papers, “Private attributes: The meanings and mechanisms of “privacy-preserving” adtech” in New Media & Society, “The after party: Cynical resignation in Adtech’s pivot to privacy” in Big Data & Society, and “Managed sovereigns: How inconsistent accounts of the human rationalize platform advertising” in Journal of Law and Political Economy.
Jen Forestal published an article, ““This Forum Is NOT A DEMOCRACY” The Role of Norms and Moderation in Cultivating (Anti)democratic Incel Identities” in Democratic Theory.
Stewart Coles, along with Dan Lane, co-edited a special issue of Political Communication titled "Race and Ethnicity as Foundational Forces in Political Communication." This special issue includes work by several CITAPers, including Deen Freelon, Meredith Pruden, Dan Malmer, Rachel Kuo, Rohan Grover, Sarah Nguyễn, and Rachel Moran.
Elizabeth Ramsey has a forthcoming article “Unlikely Partners in a Media Literacy Initiative” (10.1080/10691316.2023.2292986), co-authored with research assistant Val Shepherd, and will be published in College & Undergraduate Libraries this month. The article makes the case for libraries' contributions to strengthening their communities' resistance to the disinformation contributing to extremist belief and action.
Reed Van Schenck published paper, "Free Platforms, Free People: Media populism, racial capitalism, and the regulation of online reactionary networks", in April of 2023. The paper was recognized as Top Student Paper by the Critical/Cultural Studies Division at NCA.
Ian Williams’ paper, “Toward a Cultural-Materialist Theory of the Vibe”, won top paper at NCA in the Economics, Communication, and Society Division.
Eva Zhao presented “How Gay and Bisexual Men Respond to Mpox Messages through Risk- Versus Identity-Based Mechanisms: An Integrated Model” as a top paper in Health Communication at NCA.
Gabriel Nicholas and co-author, Michael Luria, published “Understanding Innovation in Interoperable Systems: A Podcasting Case Study” (Center for Democracy & Technology).
Felix Simon published “Escape Me If You Can: How AI Reshapes News Organisations’ Dependency on Platform Companies” in Digital Journalism. Felix also co-authored a peer-reviewed commentary for Misinformation Review, “Misinformation Reloaded? Fears about the impact of generative AI on misinformation are overblown.”
🏆Awards
Francesca Tripodi was awarded the 2023 CIP Award for Impact & Excellence from the University of Washington.
She was selected for her research excellence, including “ethnographic observations of two Republican groups over the course of the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial race and her firsthand experience of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Tripodi’s book, The Propagandists’ Playbook (2022, Yale University Press) combines this ethnographic data with content analysis and scraped metadata to reveal how Google algorithms, YouTube playlists, pundits, and politicians can manipulate audiences, reaffirm beliefs, and expose audiences to more extremist ideas, blurring the lines between reality and fiction.” Read more about CITAP’s trip to Seattle here!
Tressie McMillan Cottom was selected as the winner of the 2023 Gittler Prize from Brandeis University.
The prize was created in 2007 by the late Professor Joseph B. Gittler to recognize outstanding and lasting scholarly contributions to racial, ethnic and/or religious relations. The annual award includes a $25,000 prize and a medal. McMillan Cottom's work touches on a broad range of cultural issues, from the racial hierarchy of beauty standards and the class codes of dressing for work, to the predation of for-profit colleges and the historical impact of racial capitalism on plural democracy. Her first book, "Lower Ed," published in 2017, focused on the impact of for-profit colleges in the United States, and her 2019 collection of essays, "Thick," was a National Book Award finalist that reimagines the modern essay form.
Meredith Pruden, Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Media at Kennesaw State University (and former post-doc at CITAP!), received the award for “Exceptional Contributions to Research”.
This is a part of a university wide initiative that recognizes the top three researchers from each college-- Pruden is a part of the Radow College of Humanities and Social Sciences which is among the largest schools at KSU.
Felix Simon won the Hans Bausch Media Prize 2023 for his study ‘Uneasy Bedfellows: AI in the media, platform companies and the question of journalistic dependency’ (Digital Journalism).
The prize is “awarded by the German public broadcaster SWR in cooperation with the Institute for Media Studies at the University of Tübingen for a scientific work of outstanding quality, in order to promote science, research and innovation in the media sector. It is judged by a jury of experts from media practice and research.”
💼New (and Next) Career Steps
Isaac Kimmel, PhD Candidate in Sociology at Notre Dame, secured a job as a Program Manger for a $1 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Education to establish a new Center to Counter Human Trafficking at Texas A&M International University.
Tori Ekstrand is finishing her 3-year term as UNC’s Caroline H. and Thomas S. Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education, where she leads UNC’s premier doctoral fellows program and its annual Royster Global conference with UNC’s strategic global partners.
Laura Schelenz successfully defended her dissertation on 6 December 2023. The title of the project is “Diversity, Technology, Power: An American Black Feminist Approach to Studying and Designing Diversity in Relation to Contemporary Technologies.”