About the event
The UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media will celebrate the outstanding ongoing research at the school in its annual Spring Research Colloquium on Wednesday, May 1, in the Freedom Forum Conference Center (305 Carroll Hall).
Daniel C. Hallin, a professor at the University of California, San Diego and an expert on media and politics, media and war, media and public health and comparative media systems, will deliver the keynote address:
Rethinking Mediatization: The Cases of Health News and Populism
The concept of mediatization has become increasingly popular in media studies in recent years, and seems highly relevant as new media forms penetrate increasingly more deeply into all aspects of social life. At the same time, early conceptualizations of mediatization have increasingly been brought into question as overly simplistic. Two case studies are used here to illustrate different ways of thinking about mediatization. The first is health news. The field of health and medicine seems clearly to be a highly mediatized field. But in medical sociology there is a parallel theory of "biomedicalization," which holds that the logic of biomedicine has come to dominate increasing areas of social life and culture. Can both of these things be happening at once? How then can we make sense of the places where these two processes interact? The second case has to do with media and politics in periods when populism is ascendant. Traditional interpretations of the mediatization of politics center around the growth of highly autonomous legacy media institutions. Populist politics is always highly mediated, but clearly involves different forms of mediatization from those that have been conceptualized particularly to understand the shift from "party democracy" to "audience democracy" in Western Europe.
The schedule will also feature research presentations from current Hussman School graduate students and a lunchtime panel discussion on the advantages and pitfalls in international and comparative field research.
Schedule
8:15-9 a.m. | Breakfast
9-10 a.m. | Rethinking Mediatization: The Case of Health News and Populism | Keynote address by Daniel C. Hallin, followed by student research presentations
10:15-11:30 am | News and Law Presentations | Moderated by Amanda Reid
- Famous last words: Elite journalists’ construction of legacy in presidential obituaries | Kirsten Adams
- Hitting ‘Delete’: Media professionals' perceptions of unpublishing and its potential threats to the journalistic paradigm | Deborah Dwyer
- Technology beats time and place: Theorizing how Generation Z engages with the news | Chris Gentilviso and Deb Aikat
- The student-legislator disconnect and a law in search of a problem: North Carolina’s “Restore/Preserve Campus Free Speech Act” | Chengyuan Shao and Tori Ekstrand
- What is the value of sex speech? A communication and law dissertation on First Amendment protection for sex speech | Kyla P. Garrett Wagner
11:45 a.m.-1 p.m. | Lunch and Panel: International Field Research
1:15-2:30 p.m. | Health, Communication and Society Presentations| Moderated by Allison Lazard
- Identifying effective message elements for e-cigarette health communication | Jacob A. Rohde, Seth M. Noar, Jennifer R. Mendel, Marissa G. Hall, M. G., Sabeeh A. Baig, Kurt M. Ribisl, and Noel T. Brewer
- Narrative message development and pretesting for adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes | Trevor Bell
- The way we get by: How narrative engagement with young adult literature influences Perceptions of Anorexia Nervosa | Meredith K. Reffner Collins and Allison Lazard
- ‘How can I be addicted? I get these from my doctor.’: Health care provider perceptions of message misinformation and bias in a national opioid awareness campaign | Elizabeth Troutman Adams
- 808s & chart place: A longitudinal content analysis of the most popular rap songs in the United States for references to struggles with mental health | Alexander Kilburn Kresovich
2:45-4 p.m.| Open Presentation Session | Moderated by Rhonda Gibson
- #mymamahood: Building and Branding Motherhood on Instagram | Evelyn Virginia Mitchell
- Shame & the screen: The significant entertainment narrative experience within body-shamed lives | Jaz Gray
- Learning about sex online: Interviews with writers of One Direction real person fiction | Ashley Marie Hedrick
- Intercultural competencies needed for evolving media professions: Educating the next generation of globally minded communicators | Pablo Mino and Rhonda Gibson
- Examining lay-led leadership roundtable: How stakeholders utilize post-crisis discourse of renewal | Jordan Morehouse
- Examining the influence of personal discussion networks on consumer engagement behavior: An egocentric network study | Yan Qu
4 p.m. | Adjournment | Grad students vs. faculty kickball game and cookout to follow
Keynote speaker
Daniel C. Hallin is a professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego. His research covers media and politics, media and war, media and public health, the history of journalistic professionalism, and comparative media systems, particularly in Europe and Latin America.
His books include "The 'Uncensored War': The Media and Vietnam," "We Keep America on Top of the World: Television News and the Public Sphere," "Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics and Comparing Media Systems Beyond the Western World" and, most recently, "Making Health Public: How News Coverage is Remaking Media, Medicine and Contemporary Life." "Comparing Media Systems" has received numerous awards and been translated into 10 languages.
Hallin earned a doctorate in political science from UC Berkeley in 1980. He is a fellow of the International Communication Association; other awards include the Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Award of the Political Communication Division of the American Political Science Association, the C. Edwin Baker Award for the Advancement of Scholarship on Media, Markets and Democracy and Fellowships at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
Lunch panel
Four recent alumni of the Hussman School doctoral program and Assistant Professor Adam J. Saffer will discuss advantages and pitfalls in international and comparative field research.
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Assistant Professor of Communications
School of Communications
Elon University
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Assistant Professor
The Media School
Indiana University
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Associate Professor
Hussman School of Journalism and Medias
College of Information and Communications
University of South Carolina
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Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
Regis University
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Assistant Professor
School of Media and Journalism
UNC-Chapel Hill
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Research legacy at the Hussman School
Over the last 50 years, our school has been at the forefront of inquiry into the nature of communication and how changing media technologies and practices affect our lives as citizens in a democracy, as human beings with health needs and as consumers in a competitive marketplace.
During the 1960s and 1970s, our researchers originated the concept of the agenda-setting function of the press, which would become one of the most influential models in the history of the field. Our forward-looking faculty taught generations of students to incorporate social science methods and computation into news reporting in the 1980s, anticipating the shift to data-driven journalism by 30 years. Our school was also at the forefront of scholarship on media history and the legal institutions required for robust democracy, as well as in the study of the effects of media exposure on our attitudes, emotions and behaviors. Also in the 1980s, our researchers helped mold the field of health communication, spurring a national movement to study the power of the media to help people live longer and healthier lives.
Today, faculty and graduate student researchers are carrying this legacy into a future marked by rapid technological change. Together, we are helping to reinvent the theoretical and methodological tools that communication scholars use for understanding the world. We analyze digital flows of social influence, the impact of Internet architecture in health communication and ways that social media shape our understanding of self and society. We work to understand the conditions under which media businesses succeed. Our guidance has helped to enable businesses to thrive, whether serving communities of 400 people or countries of a billion people. We work on global issues, such as human- trafficking, climate change and disease prevention, by helping journalists and scientists communicate effectively with audiences. We examine national issues such as Internet privacy by mapping the state of media and American democracy. We are at the forefront of psychological and behavioral research involving digital media, and we translate our findings into applications that serve the industry and society as a whole.
For more on research at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, visit mj.unc.edu/research.