13,888 The Drum Beat 774, May 22 2019, Klein College of Media and Communication

* AN INTRODUCTION TO THE KLEIN COLLEGE OF MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION
* A BRIEF LOOK AT KLEIN COLLEGE COURSEWORK
* KLEIN FACULTY: SELECTED CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD
* PLEASE LEND YOUR VOICE TO THE CI SURVEY

Undergraduates can major in:

• * Advertising
• * Communication and Social Influence
• * Communication Studies
• * Journalism
• * Media Studies and Production
• * Public Relations

More than 200 graduate students pursue professional and scholarly opportunities in the 6 following graduate programmes:

• * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Media and Communication
• * Master of Arts in Media Studies and Production
• * Master of Journalism
• * Online Master of Science in Communication Management
• * Master of Science in Globalization and Development Communication. (See also this descriptionon The CI site, with our many thanks to Temple for supporting The CI as a longtime CI Associate).
• * Master of Science in Strategic Advertising and Marketing

The items that follow are just a few of the research papers published by 7 selected faculty members; click on the names of those authors to access any additional items of theirs that may be available on The CI platform. In addition, click here for the full listing of faculty and details about their research interests.

• 1.Four Challenges in the Field of Alternative, Radical and Citizens’ Media Research
  by Clemencia Rodríguez, Benjamin Ferron, and Kristin Shamas
  This article explores the research challenges that have emerged for scholars in the field of Communication for Social Change (CfSC) who study the role of Web 2.0 technologies in the work of activists and social movements. Based on examples from social movements around the world, the article highlights and discusses 4 research challenges: (i) Accounting for historical context; (ii) Anchoring analysis in a political economy of information and communication technologies (ICTs); (iii) Acknowledging the complexity of communication processes; and (iv) Positioning new research in relation to existing knowledge and literature within the field of CfSC. [Mar 2014]
• 2.Inequality and Communicative Struggles in Digital Times: A Global Report on Communication for Social Progress
  by Nick Couldry, Clemencia Rodríguez, G&oumlt;ran Bolin, Julie Cohen, et al.
  Featuring an action plan and toolkit, this book is an investigation of media’s role in social change, and potentially social progress. By «media», the authors mean not only technologies for the production, dissemination, and reception of communication, but also the contents distributed through those technologies and the institutions associated with their production, dissemination, and reception. The book is the product of an international collaboration, with authors hailing from around the world, housed in several disciplines, and with different approaches to communication. What unites them is the belief that communication strategies and practices must be deployed in the service of global social progress. [2018]
• 3.In Search of Local Knowledge on ICTs in Africa
  by Iginio Gagliardone, Ashnah Kalemera, Lauren Kogen, Lillian Nalwoga, Nicole Stremlau, and Wakabi Wairagala
  New ICTs have been hailed as tools for encouraging economic development, promoting peace, and improving the effectiveness of government in developing and conflict-affected regions. This article explores whether the claims of the transformative power of ICTs are backed by real evidence and whether local knowledge – e.g., traditional mechanisms for conflict resolution – is taken into consideration by ICT-based development initiatives. The countries that are the focus of this article – Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia – offer a comparative perspective on different approaches to ICT usage. [Jun 2015]
• 4.Not Up for Debate: US News Coverage of Hunger in Africa
  by Lauren Kogen
  This study examines how the US news media construct the topic of hunger in Africa for US audiences. Specifically, through a framing analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA) of randomly sampled newspaper stories, the article addresses how news frames define and delimit: the relationship between US citizens and foreign sufferers, US public sphere discussion of foreign humanitarian crises, and citizens’ political engagement with the issue. «What American citizens are left with…is a public sphere that not only does not nurture a productive discussion on solutions to extreme poverty and suffering in Africa, but makes the discussion itself seem outside the geographic scope of relevant public sphere-appropriate issues for American news audiences.» [Nov 2014]
• 5.A Case for Quantitative Assessment of Participatory Communication Programs
  by Tom Jacobson
  A participatory approach to social change represents a move away from programme planning and implementation in which goals are determined beforehand and communicated to beneficiaries. Instead, the power for decision-making rests in the hands of community members. Though valuable, participatory projects are often seen as being difficult to evaluate. How can we produce meaningful assessments of the extent to which community members felt free to participate during the planning, implementation, and/or evaluation of programme interventions? This paper presents an approach to assessing participatory communication based on communication in the form of dialog as conceptualised by Jurgen Habermas. Jacobson suggests that the method is capable of generating quantitative data and is applicable in principle to the assessment of the planning, implementation, and evaluation phases in a range of interventions. [2007]
• 6.Governance Reform Under Real World Conditions: Citizens, Stakeholders, and Voice
  by Sina Odugbemi (ed.) and Thomas L. Jacobson (ed.)
  This World Bank publication is intended to demonstrate to a broad audience – including governments, think tanks, civil society organisations, and development agencies – the ways in which communication research can help address development challenges, particularly in the area of governance reform in developing countries. Throughout the book, recurrent themes emerge related to: the importance of leadership, even in consensus-building efforts; the importance of networks; the concepts of dialogue, deliberation, decision making, and negotiation; the ideas of participation and the public sphere; and the idea of strategic communication, which refers to systematic efforts to engage communication thoughtfully and proactively, rather than in a post-hoc manner, and to use all available communication tools. [2008]
• 7.Communication for Development and Social Change and the Challenge of Climate Change
  by Patrick D. Murphy and Tracy Mwaka Tinga
  This article argues that, as a field, communication for development and social change (CDSC) has a role to play in the study of, and action around, climate change. To help inform this role, Murphy and Tinga suggest that: (i) CDSC should be aware of its overlap with environmentalism in terms of assumptions about who or what has the power to act (agency), in that both look through the lens of concepts such as power, governance, voice, community, rights, and cultural knowledge; (ii) CDSC must be informed by past research about what citizens in the global South know about climate change and how awareness impacts action; and (iii) scholars should be guided by the lessons from past climate-change-focused CDSC initiatives. As an example, the article explores a multi-stakeholder campaign that used music to educate Kenyan youth on climate change and help them be heard by Kenyan policymakers. [2019]
• 8.On Media, Social Movements, and Uprisings: Lessons from Afghanistan, Its Neighbors, and Beyond
  by Wazhmah Osman
  After the lifting of a nearly decade-long media ban imposed by the Taliban, and in the aftermath of the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks, Afghanistan experienced a surge in new media outlets. In this essay, Osman focuses on television, in particular, to study popular movements, collective action, self-representation, and people’s agency in Afghanistan. She explores television’s role in directing the global dialogue about Afghanistan back to local Afghans themselves. She also examines the ways in which television allows producers to act as local reformers, challenging powerful local conservative groups – in the process, however, introducing risks to female media makers, in particular. [Summer 2014]
• 9.Between the White House and the Kremlin: A Comparative Analysis of Afghan and Tajik Media
  by Wazhmah Osman
  Why did two neighbours, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, who share cultural, linguistic, and historical similarities, take divergent paths in the development of their mass media, public sphere, and democracy? Whereas Afghanistan exhibits many of the attributes of democratic media systems, Tajikistan’s media remains repressive and statist. By highlighting the successes of Afghanistan and failures of Tajikistan, Osman argues that the reasons for their vastly different trajectories are due to the extent to which the different political economic regimes support and control the two countries. [2019]
• 10.Engaging Stigmatized Communities through Solutions Journalism: Residents of South Los Angeles Respond
  by Andrea Wenzel, Daniela Gerson, Evelyn Moreno, Minhee Son, and Breanna Morrison Hawkins
  Social scientists have argued that, by focusing on deficits and problems, media play a role in the stigmatisation of neighbourhoods with high levels of violence, crime, and poverty. This study looks at a research-driven media initiative that attempted to take an alternate approach to covering challenges facing the community of South Los Angeles (LA), California, US. The article centres around how South LA residents who participated in follow-up focus groups responded to the «solutions journalism» format of this local media coverage. Ultimately, the study seeks to contribute a greater understanding of the implications of this type of journalism for sustaining a healthy local storytelling network. [Apr 2017]
• 11.‘A Journalist Should Step Correct:’ Building Trust in Local News
  by Andrea Wenzel, Anthony Nadler, Melissa Valle, and Marc Lamont Hill
  This article provides a summary of months of assessment and conversation about local journalism with two demographically different neighbourhoods in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US metropolitan area. Commonalities between the residents’ wish lists in both areas included wanting more coverage that explored attempted solutions to local problems and constructive initiatives in the community, opportunities for media to work with communities to create coverage, and an openness to media facilitating discussion on community issues. A series of workshops held for study participants, community leaders, and journalists generated ideas to address the challenges raised by the study. [Jun 2018]
• 12.Sharing the News: Journalistic Collaboration as Field Repair
  by Lucas Graves and Magda Konieczna
  «News sharing» involves two or more rival news outlets working together to produce and/or distribute news. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews carried out in the US, the authors analyse news sharing on the part of investigative news nonprofits, which focus on long-term reporting projects, and professional fact-checking groups, which specialise in debunking falsehoods and countering misinformation. This article looks at their explicit mission of journalistic reform: to the ways they seek to not only practice but to repair the field of journalism. [Jan 2015]