Mike Alvarez, a Comm Ph.D. candidate and recipient of the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, served as visiting scholar at the fall 2017 residency of Goddard Graduate Institute at Goddard College.

Mike F. Alvarez, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication, wrote a column about how the Netflix series “13 Reasons Why,” about the suicide of a young girl, may be uncomfortable to watch but it also deals directly with some of the complicated reasons people kill themselves. Alvarez says forbidding teenagers from watching the show is not the right way to handle the question of understanding and preventing suicide.

The Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst seeks a Health Communication scholar whose research and teaching focus on cultures, discourses, and practices of health with a preferred focus on race, equity, and inclusion. We seek a colleague whose work complements and extends the traditions in the department, which include critical cultural studies; language & social interaction; media, technology, & policy; and rhetoric and performance.