SJMC Weekly Announcements

Kudos

Jillian Padgett successfully defends thesis

Congratulations to MA student Jillian Padgett on successfully defending her masters thesis. The project, “Listening and Value Frames about the Constitution in 'Cancel Culture' Controversies,” is a qualitative discourse analysis of three case studies. Jillian examined constitutional fundamentalism and whether focusing on equal protection and attentive listening holds promise for reducing fundamentalist approaches. Committee members Christine Garlough (Gender and Women’s Studies) and Doug McLeod, as well as Jillian’s adviser, Katy Culver, applauded the creativity, timeliness and importance of the questions Jillian is exploring. Jillian will be staying on in the department for her doctoral studies. Congratulations, Jillian!

Luhang Sun earns first place in AEJMC competition

Congratulations to PhD student Luhang Sun for earning first place in the Markham Competition Award for the International Communication Division of AEJMC for her article "Patriotism or Bitch-hunting? A Multi-layer Computational Discourse Analysis in Chinese Misogynistic Discourses," a study of Chinese online misogyny on Zhihu, the biggest Q&A forum in China. She will present her research at the AEJMC conference in Detroit in August!

In the news: Cap Times Opinion: Evjue grant honors Maraniss family and supports journalism

The board of the Evjue Foundation, The Capital Times’ charitable arm created by founder William T. Evjue’s will, approved a multiyear grant totaling $62,500 to add funding to a journalism scholarship program named for Elliott Maraniss, father of Board of Visitors member David Maraniss, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Read more.

Publications

Article in Human Communication Research

New paper from the Computational Approaches and Message Effects Research (CAMER) Group within the Mass Communication Research Center, "Algorithmic Agents in the Hybrid Media System: Social Bots, Selective Amplification, and Partisan News about COVID-19." Authors include SJMC PhD student Zening Duan, Jianing Li (PhD'22), Josephine Lukito (PhD'20), Kai-Cheng Yang (Indiana), Fan Chen (Indiana), Dhavan Shah and Sijia Yang. The article in the journal Human Communication Research employs bot detection techniques, structural topic modeling, and time series analysis to characterize the temporal associations between the topics Twitter bots tend to amplify and subsequent news coverage across the partisan spectrum. Read in Human Communication Research.

Events

Summer Kickoff Party - Friday, May 20th, 3:00 p.m.

From Danny Parker: Everyone (and their partners or +1 and children!) are invited to Doug’s house for a big summer kick-off party on May 20th at 3pm!

Doug McLeod, Mike Wagner, and Lew Friedland are reuniting the SJMC band with new member Max Fuller!!! (We need karaoke-style singing volunteers-so please text Danny to sign up!)

We’ll have live music, and be serving food and drinks (including alcoholic beverages). Feel free to bring lawn chairs, picnic blankets, a dish, a beverage, or just your awesome self!!!! It will be outdoors if no rain and if it rains, we’ll move the stage into the garage!

If you have questions, need a ride, or want to volunteer to drive our SJMC friends without cars or be a designated driver, email Danny at kdparker@wisc.edu.

P.S. Faculty and staff-we want to see you there!

Also, parents: this time around we’ve got RSVP on a couple of kids so your children will have someone to play with-and there is a playground in front of Doug’s house!

Address:

6821 Ramsey Rd

Middleton, WI

Can’t wait to see you all there!