Department of Communication Graduate Faculty

Claudio Moreira: Chair and Professor. Ph.D., University of Illinois. The intersection of race, gender, and class; performance auto-ethnography; transformative action and performative space.

Author or co-author of Betweener Autoethnographies: A Path towards Social Justice (2018, Routledge) and Betweener Talk: An Indigenous Dialogue on Postcolonial Class, Praxis, and Justice (2009, Left Coast Press); “Resisting (Resistance) Stories: A Tri-Autoethnographic Exploration of Father Narratives across Shades of Difference,” “Missing Bodies: Troubling the Colonial Landscape of American Academia,” “Made for Sex”; “Life in So Many Acts”; “The Tales of Conde, Zezao, Master Claudio, and Claudio.”

Current research topics: Performance studies; social justice; sport and advertising

Kevin T. Anderson: Senior Lecturer. Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst. Film studies and anthropology; social aesthetics; phenomenology of technology and the body.

Research traverses the fields of film studies and anthropology, particularly along the lines of the social aesthetics and phenomenology of technology and the body. Author of “Tickling and Teasing the Real: Mocking Reality TV in the Film Series 7”; “Joris Ivens’ 400 Million”; “Finding the Essential: A Phenomenological Look at Hal Hartley’s No Such Thing.” Director of film Awakening the Internal Sound: The Music and Mission of Rabindra Goswami (2020), which has played in multiple international film festivals and won the prize for Best Documentary Short at the 2021 Beyond Earth Film Festival. Also director of Layers of Pompeii (2019).

Seyram Avle: Associate Professor. Ph.D., University of Michigan. Global media, digital technology culture in the global south, tech entrepreneurship, labor and production

Author or co-author of: “Tinkering with Governance: Technopolitics and the Economization of Citizenship”; “How Methods Make Designers”; “Designing Here and There: Tech Entrepreneurs, Global Markets, and Reflexivity”; “Articulating and Enacting Development: Skilled Returnees in Ghana’s ICT Industry”; “Situating Ghana’s New Media Industry: Liberalization and Transnational Entrepreneurship”; “Radio Locked on @citi973: FM Radio Audiences on Twitter”; “Global Flows, Media and Developing Democracies”; Whose Freedom, Whose Information?: Discourses on Freedom of Information policies.”

Soo Young Bae: Associate Professor. Ph.D., University of Michigan. New communication technology and social media; political communication, credibility; persuasion, social influence, big data.

Author or co-author of “The Medium and the Backlash: The Disparagement of the #MeToo Movement in Online Public Discourse in South Korea,” “Social media prosumption and online political participation: An examination of online communication processes,” “The social mediation of political rumors: Examining the dynamics in social media and belief in political rumors,” “A Trigger or Muffler? -Examining the Dynamics of Crosscutting Exposure and Political Expression in Outline Social Media”; “Who Will Cross the Border? - The Transition of Political Discussion into the Newly Emerged Venues”; “Mobile Communication and Public Affairs Engagement in Korea: An Examination of Non-Linear Relationships between Mobile Phone Use and Engagement across Age Groups.”

Benjamin Bailey: Professor. Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles. Social interaction; culture and language; discourse analysis; communication of ethnic/racial identities; inter- ethnic/intercultural communication.

Author of Language, Race, and Negotiation of Identity: A Study of Dominican Americans and a number of publications on language and social identity, intercultural communication, and multilingualism. Current research focuses on communicative practices and identities across both individual developmental time and historically changing communities.

Burcu Baykurt: Assistant Professor. Ph.D., Columbia University. Technology studies; culture and communication; media infrastructures; political communication; critical data studies; ethnography, historical and comparative methods.

Author or co-author of: "Soft Power Internationalism, 1990-2015: Critical-Historical Approaches;" “Circulating Liberalism: The Global Internet and the Rise of Soft Power Internationalism, 1990-2015;” “Illiberal Media and Popular Constitution-Making in Turkey;” "How Does a Culture of Health Change? Lessons from the War on Cigarettes;" "David Versus Goliath: Digital Resources for Expanded Reporting—and Censoring;" and "Redefining Citizenship and Civic Engagement: Political Values Embodied in FixMyStreet.com."

Allison Butler: Senior Lecturer. Ph.D., New York University. Media Literacy; Teacher Education in Media Literacy; Community Service Learning

Author of Key Scholarship in Media Literacy: David Buckingham (2022, Brill Sense) and Educating Media Literacy: The Need for Critical Media Literacy in Teacher Education (2019, Brill Sense). Author or co-author of “Inspiration and motivation: The similarities and differences between critical and acritical media literacy,” “Building Media Literacy in Higher Education: Department Approaches, Undergraduate Certificate, and Engaged Scholarship,” and “Teacher Education: The Next Needed Step in Critical Media Literacy Education.”

Mari Castañeda: Professor. Ph.D., University of California, San Diego. Political economy of communication; Spanish-language and Latina/o media and cultural production; communication policy and the property creation of new digital technologies; community service learning and engaged scholarship.

Co-editor of the following books: Civic Engagement in Diverse Latinx Communities: Learning from Social Justice Partnerships in Action (2018, Peter Lang Publishers), Mothers in Academia (2013, Columbia University Press) and Soap Operas and Telenovelas in the Digital Age: Global Industries and New Audiences (2011, Peter Lang Publishers). Author of the following publications: “The Complicated Transition to Broadcast Digital Television in the United States” Television and New Media; Latinidad, Cultural Policy, and Spanish-language Media in the U.S.A., Techno/futuros: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies; “Remapping Spanish-language Media in the U.S.”; “Transformative Learning through Community Engagement.”

Briankle G. Chang: Professor. Ph.D., University of Illinois. Cultural studies; media criticism; philosophy of communication.

Author of “Eclipse of Being: Heidegger and Derrida”; “Mass, Media, Mass Mediation: Jean Baudrillard’s Implosive Critique of Modern Mass Mediated Society”; Deconstructing Communication: Subject, Representation, and Economies of Exchange; “Copies, Reproducibility, and Aesthetic Adequacy”; “Representing Representation: the Visual Semiotics of Las Meninas”; “Notes on Linguistic Principle and Iconic Communication”; “Empty Intention.”

Current research focuses on symbolic economies and postcolonial discourse.

Anne T. Ciecko: Associate Professor. Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh. International and intercultural cinema; gender studies; cultural studies and critical theory; film/arts/culture criticism, public programming, and community service/praxis.

Selected published work includes Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture in a Global Frame; “Digital Territories and States of Independence: Jordan’s Film Scenes”; “Into the Sc(re)enery: Bollywood Locations and Docu-diaspora”; “Ways to Sink the Titanic: Contemporary Box-Office Successes in the Philippines, Thailand, and South Korea”; “Muscle, Market Value, Telegenesis, Cyberpresence: The New Asian Movie Star in the Global Economy of Masculine Images”; “Superhit Hunk Heroes for Sale: Globalization and Bollywood’s Gender Politics”; “Representing the Spaces of Diaspora in Contemporary British Films by Women”; “Sex, God, Television, Realism, and the British Woman Filmmakers”; “Transnational Action: John Woo, Hong Kong, Hollywood”; interviews with Singaporean filmmaker Royston Tan, Indonesian filmmakers Riri Riza and Rudy Soedjarwo, and the director and producer of Yemen’s first feature film; coverage of international film festivals.

Director, UMass Amherst Graduate Certificate Program in Film Studies. Catalog description and requirements are available online at https://www.umass.edu/film/film-graduate-program.

Current and ongoing research interests include globalization and national cinemas (emerging and resurging local and transnational film cultures); international film festivals; nonwestern cinema and popular genres (especially Asian, Arab, and African cinema); international transmedia stardom/celebrity and gender politics; diasporic representational strategies; transcultural film, video, and multimedia installations by women.

Leda Cooks: Professor. Ph.D., Ohio University. Food studies; performance studies; critical intercultural communication; whiteness studies; feminist, postcolonial, and critical communication theory; critical pedagogy; conflict/mediation; community engaged learning and research.

Author or co-author of studies of the discourse and performance of food, identity, culture, and social justice: e.g. “Constructing Habitus in Matters of Food Taste and Waste”; “You Are What You (Don’t) Eat: The Performance of Food, Identity and Resistance”; studies of whiteness in media, intergroup, and classroom contexts: e.g. “On the Cover of the Rolling Stone: Toward a Monstrous Pedagogy of Whiteness”; “Pedagogy of Communication and the (Critical) Communication of Pedagogy”; “Revisiting the Borderlands of Intercultural Communication”; “The (In)Visible Whiteness of Being: Creating and Positioning the Self in Sojourn”; and studies of community based teaching: e.g., “Toward a Social Approach to Learning in Community Service Learning”; “Communicating Advocacy: A Media Literacy and Violence Prevention Project in Sixth Grade Classrooms”; “Feminist Pedagogies and Reflections on Resistance.” Co-editor of Dis/Placing Race: Whiteness, Pedagogy and Performance. Co-editor of special issues of Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, and Text and Performance Quarterly.

Current research focuses on the discourse and performance of food and identity; collective memory, social justice and community; the intersections of community service learning and critical pedagogy; intergroup dialogue, democracy, and whiteness.

Gonen Dori-Hacohen: Associate Professor. Ph.D., University of Haifa. Discourse analysis; broadcast talk; language of political participation; everyday interaction, financial discourse.

Author or co-author of “Our neighbors who sit Among Us and Next to Us": Interactions with the "Other" on Israeli Political Radio Phone-in Programs,” “Criticism, consensus, and fandom: Demonstrated practices from a sports Facebook fan page,” “Yiddish across borders: Interviews in the Yiddish ultra-Orthodox Jewish audio mass medium,” “On-line commenting on opinion editorials: A cross-cultural examination of face work in the Washington Post (USA) and NRG(Israel),” “Spontaneous or Controlled: Overall Structural Organization of Political Phone- ins in Two Countries and their Relations to Societal Norms”; “‘Rush, I Love You’: Interactional Fandom on American Political Talk-Radio”; “The Cultural Meanings of Israeli Tokbek (Talk-Back Online Commenting) and their Relevance to the Online Democratic Public Sphere”; “‘Booyah Jim’: The Construction of Hegemonic Masculinity in CNBC ‘Mad Money’ Phone-in Interactions.”

Currently I study civic participation in Israeli radio phone-ins, American Political Radio Talk, and other arenas of public participation, such as online comments. I will be happy to compare these arenas to similar arenas in other countries. Further information can be found at https://umass.academia.edu/GonenDoriHacohen.

Ayanna Dozier: Assistant Professor. Ph.D., McGill University. Experimental film; performance; analog media production; Black feminist media studies.

Ayanna Dozier is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker-artist and writer working with performance, experimental film, installation, printmaking, and analog photography. Her research in film navigates the history of distribution, archaeology, and radical work of Black feminist experimental filmmakers. While her current research and artwork is dedicated to examining how transactional intimacy (like sex work) redistributes care from the private sector into the public, social politics of relations. She teaches courses related to analog and video art production, aesthetics, and sexuality—paying close attention to how race and gender intersect within these fields. Her film work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the National Museum of African American Museum of History and Culture. She is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020) and is currently working on a manuscript on how Black feminist experimental media makers use of film’s form and aesthetics to tackle the taboo.

Martha Fuentes-Bautista: Senior Lecturer. Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin. Telecommunication and community media policy; technology and inequality; immigration and new media technologies; global communications and institutions; communication policy in the Americas; social movements and new media technologies.

Author or co-author of “Bridging the Broadband Gap or Recreating Digital Inequalities? The Social Shaping of Public Wi-fi in Austin,” “Reconfiguring Public Internet Access in Austin, TX: Wi- Fi’s Promise and Broadcast Divides;” “NGOs and Government: The Social Shaping of Internet from Below”; “Still Divided: Ethnicity, Generation, Cultural Capital and New Technologies”; “Universal Service in Times of Reform: Affordability and Accessibility of Telecommunication Services in Latin America.”

Current research focuses on the social and policy implications of information and communication technologies with a particular interest in how ICT may exacerbate or alleviate social inequalities. Building on case studies in Latin America and the U.S., her research projects explore the institutional context of ICT adoption and use in inner city and rural communities, and the role of local governments, non-profits, and social movements in promoting and managing community computing solutions for these populations.

Stephen Olbrys Gencarella: Associate Professor. Ph.D., Indiana University. Rhetoric; performance studies; folklore.

Author or co-author of Readings on Rhetoric and Performance; “"The Thin Blue Line in a Thick Blue State: A Critical Folklore Study,” “"Thunder without Rain: Fascist Masculinity in AMC's The Walking Dead,” “Purifying Rhetoric: Empedocles and the Myth of Rhetorical Theory”; “The Myth of Rhetoric: Korax and the Art of Pollution”; “Critique, Folk Criticism, and the Art of Critical Folklore Studies”; “Gramsci, Good Sense, and Critical Folklore Studies”; “Touring History: Guidebooks and the Commodification of the Salem Witch Trials”; “Dissoi Logoi, Civic Friendship, and the Politics of Education.”

Current research concerns three issues: (1) The promotion of a critical folklore studies as an activist scholarship to examine and redress social injustice, with particular attention to the constitutive nature of expressive culture; (2) The investigation and contemporary appropriation of myths of rhetoric in classical antiquity, to include voices and concepts often excluded from the canonical texts of the rhetorical tradition; (3) The relationship between rhetorical studies and social theory, especially to criticize persistent discourses of fascism and violence, and to advocate democratic modes of living with others.

Seth Goldman: Associate Professor. Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. Effects of mass media and political communication on stereotyping and prejudice, especially with regard to public opinion about race and sexual orientation.

Author or co-author of “Effects of the 2008 Obama Presidential Campaign on White Racial Prejudice”; ““How White is the Global Elite? An Analysis of Race, Gender and Network Structure,” ““Debating How to Measure Media Exposure in Surveys,” ““Past Place, Present Prejudice: The Impact of Adolescent Racial Context on White Racial Attitudes,” ““When Can Exemplars Shape White Racial Attitudes? Evidence from the 2012 U.S. Presidential Campaign,” “Televised Exposure to Politics: New Measures for a Fragmented Media Environment”; “All Virtue is Relative: A Response to Prior?”; “The Friendly Media Phenomenon: A Cross-National Analysis Cross-Cutting Exposure”; “From Gay Bashing to Gay Baiting: Public Opinion and News Media Frames for Gay Marriage”; The Obama Effect: How the 2008 Campaign Changed White Racial Attitudes.

Roopali Mukherjee: Professor. Ph.D., The Ohio State University. British cultural studies, critical race theory, critical race feminisms, racial capitalism, African Americans/Blackness in US public culture, brand cultures, Foucault studies, qualitative research methods.

Author: The Blacking Factory: The Brand in Racial Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press, in press) and The Racial Order of Things: Cultural Imaginaries of the Post-Soul Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Co-editor: Racism Postrace (Duke University Press, 2019) and Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times (NYU Press, 2012).

Jonathan Corpus Ong: Professor. Ph.D., University of Cambridge. Global media, disasters, development, and humanitarian communication; ethnography of social media; creative and digital labor; mediated protest, witnessing and solidarities; ethics of communication.

Author of The Poverty of Television: The Mediation of Suffering in Class-Divided Philippines (2015, Anthem Press) and co-editor of Taking the Square: Mediated Dissent and Occupations of Public Space (2016, Rowman & Littlefield). Author or co-author of “Queer Cosmopolitanism in the Disaster Zone”; “Local Aid Workers as ‘Entrepreneurial Survivors’”; “Finding a Voice through Humanitarian Technologies?”; “‘Witnessing’ or 'Mediating’ Distant Suffering?”; “Where Is the Cosmopolitan?”; “Watching the Nation, Singing the Nation.” Co- editor of Taking the Square: Mediated Dissent and Occupations of Public Space. Co-editor-in-chief of Television & New Media.

My current research projects include: 1) digital labor in the global South, focusing on diverse kinds of online freelance work in the Philippines and the emergence of new social hierarchies. I currently lead the research strand on online political trolls and the production of disinformation in Duterte’s Philippines through ethnographic work with avatar operators and Facebook group moderators and 2) entertainment media and convivial culture following rupture, drawing from case studies on the European refugee crisis and post-Katrina New Orleans.

Kimberlee Pérez: Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director. Ph.D., Arizona State University. Performance studies; queer of color theory and women of color feminism; critical cultural, intercultural, transnational and postcolonial communication studies, Latin@ studies.

Author or co-author of Answer the Call: Virtual Migration in Indian Call Centers; “You Can Get Anything You Want”; “Here and Not Yet Here: A Dialogue at the Intersection of Queer, Trans, and Culture”; “My Monster and My Muse: Rewriting the Colonial Hangover”; “Blasphemies and Queer Potentiality: Performance and/as Relation.” Co-editor of Queer Praxis: Questions for LGBTQ Worldmaking.

Current research focuses on intimacy and belonging; audience; queer relationality; identity and intersectionality politics and how they are communicated; personal narrative; solo performance.

Lynn Phillips: Senior Lecturer. Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. Subjective and social implications of media images of hypermasculinity and the hypersexualization of young girls; the commercialization of children’s culture; health and environmental impacts of media-driven consumerism.

Author of Flirting with Danger: Young Women’s Reflections on Sexuality and Violence; “Everyday Courage and the ‘How’ of Our Work”; “Speak for Yourself: What Girls Say About What Girls Need.”

Erica Scharrer: Professor. Ph.D., Syracuse University. Media content, opinions of media, media effects, and media literacy, especially those pertaining to gender and violence.

Co-author of Quantitative Research Methods in Communication: The Power of Numbers for Social Justice (2021, Sage Publications) and Television: What’s on, Who’s Watching, and What it Means; The Psychology of Media and Politics; Media and the American Child (1999, Academic Press). Author or co-author of numerous articles on such topics as depictions of masculinity (e.g., “Working Hard or Hardly Working?: Gender and Performance of Chores in Television Commercials”), perceptions of media influence (e.g., “First-Person Shooters and Third- Person Effects: Early Adolescents’ Perceptions of Video Game Influence”), media representations of gender and violence (e.g., “Virtual Violence: Gender and Aggression in Video Game Advertisements”), and the effectiveness of media literacy curricula (e.g., “Sixth Graders Take on Television: Media Literacy and Critical Attitudes about Television Violence”). Editor of Media Effects/Media Psychology.

Shawn Shimpach: Associate Professor. Ph.D., New York University. Cinema studies; television studies; media and cultural studies; cultural history of entertainment; significance of popular culture.

Editor of The Routledge Companion to Global Television (2020). Author of Television in Transition: The Life and Afterlife of the Narrative Action Hero (2010, Wiley-Blackwell), “’Only in This Way is Social Progress Possible': Early Cinema, Gender, and the Social Survey Movement." “"Mad Men is History,” “The Immortal Cosmopolitan: The International Co-production and Global Circulation of Highlander: The Series”; “Working Watching: The Creative and Cultural Labor of the Media Audience”; “Representing the Public of the Cinema’s Public Sphere.”

Current research focuses on social and institutional constructions of Hollywood’s audience, and the textual and institutional negotiation of geopolitical economic transformations in popular culture, and television in transition.

Alena L. Vasilyeva: Associate Professor. Ph.D., Rutgers University. Argumentation; practical use of language in conflict management and problem solving decision making collaboration; non- verbal communication; communication design; social interaction in different settings (institutional talk mundane conversations) and at different levels (interpersonal communication, group interaction, social networks); social identity.

Author of “The facilitator's communicative actions to construct meetings in a semi-informal educational context,” “Strategic maneuvering in dispute mediation,” “Language ideology and identity construction in public educational meetings,” “Argumentation in the Context of Mediation Activity”; “Topics as Indication of Being On- Task/Off-Task”; “The Treatment of Fallacies in Argumentative Situations During Mediation Sessions.”

Emily West: Professor and Graduate Program Director. Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. Promotion, Technology, and Culture; Audiences, Users, and Consumers; and Media and Nationalism

Author of Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly (MIT Press, 2022), co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture (Routledge, 2013), author or co-author of “Review Pollution: Pedagogy for a Post-Truth Society,” “Amazon: Surveillance as a Service,” “). “Activism, Advertising, and Far-Right Media: The ¬Case of Sleeping Giants,” and “Invitation to Witness: The Role of Subjects in Documentary Representations of the End of Life.”