Research

Our Research Areas 

  • Film Studies
  • Media Effects and Popular Culture 
  • Media, Technology, and Society
  • Rhetoric and Performance Studies
  • Social Interaction and Culture 

Interdisciplinary Research 

Our faculty are international authors whose work regularly appears in virtually every major North American journal in the field, as well as dozens of international journals. Our work is also found in the journals of such related fields as psychology, sociology, American studies, cinema studies, performance studies, feminist studies, Latino/a studies, and art history, and in specialty publications addressing quantitative and qualitative research methods. Along with distinguished scholarship in large sample survey research, content analysis, and experiments, we offer unusual depth in qualitative approaches -- for example, in communication ethnography, field research in media and cultural studies, conversation analysis, textual criticism, media historiography, audience research, critical policy analysis, qualitative approaches to political economy, and participatory action research including community media making.


Research Goals 

Increasingly, members of our faculty undertake sponsored projects that apply Communication principles to questions of social, cultural, and governmental importance: for example in research on translation and international relations; culture-specific approaches to security, gender, and technology development; national and regional broadband access and practice; and health policy and community health practice. In different ways, faculty share a commitment to Communication scholarship as a route to social understanding, participation, and justice.

Graduate research in the Department of Communication is equally broad. Our graduate students are active as authors, editors, and presenters of original research at national and international scholarly events.
 

For more information 

The best way to get a sense of the range and depth of our research activity is to explore this website. Visit our faculty and graduate program pages, review recent master's theses and doctoral dissertations, sample our scholarship through individual curriculum vitae, and follow news of our research events