University of California, Santa Barbara

Studies how family members and partners communicate under stress and how it shapes relational, mental, and physiological health, using surveys, diaries, lab interactions, and biomarkers.

Studies how uncertainty drives information seeking and decision-making, developing the Theory of Motivated Information Management and a Chronic Uncertainty Framework for immigrant communities.

Studies British, French, and Belgian colonial media, focusing on documentary, radio, and cinema in West Africa and Southeast Asia, through historical and archival research.

Studies credibility and deception detection, examining how dominance, nonverbal synchrony, and power shape impressions and persuasion in interpersonal and mediated interaction.

Studies collaboration in global, remote, and hybrid teams and how digital media and AI transform organizing, using field-based qualitative and quantitative methods.

Studies media industries and digital media policy, tracing the history of regulating pipelines, platforms, data, and cloud infrastructures.

Examines how structurally rooted stressors affect the health and well-being of immigrant youth and families and what promotes thriving, using quantitative and qualitative methods.

Documents how social groups are represented across media and tests how exposure to these portrayals affects users' cognitions, emotions, behaviors, and intergroup dynamics.

Studies film history and the entertainment industry, especially film exhibition and how Hollywood movie theaters projected American power worldwide, using archival research.

Studies how everyday interpersonal communication relates to well-being, connection, forgiveness, and hope, using experience sampling of daily social interaction.

Studies how people judge the credibility of online information and make privacy decisions in digital environments, using quantitative social science methods.

Studies the communicative constitution of organizations and workplace interaction, including newcomer socialization, emotion management, work-life balance, and organizational identification.

Studies the role of emotion in media processes and effects, focusing on emotional persuasive messages and how media use relates to stress, coping, and well-being.

Studies satellite technologies, media infrastructures, and media globalization, along with militarization, surveillance, and AI, through media history and critical theory.

Studies film and media history and historiography from a feminist perspective, including cinema and gender, 1920s movie stars, and media and global security.

Studies communication in group processes and intergroup relations through social identity and evolutionary theories, such as voice pitch shifts as honest signals of aggression.

Studies the social uses and effects of new media, organizational communication, environmental and public communication campaigns, and social networks, including bibliometric methods.

Studies how media portrayals affect intergroup relations among racial, ethnic, and religious groups and how minorities use and cope with media, applying social psychological theory.

Studies global and Indian media through critical cultural analysis, examining piracy and informal media of the global South, populism, risk and securitization, and queer subcultures.

Studies global health communication through culture-centered, community-partnered interventions, addressing pandemic governance and the health impacts of climate change.

Develops theories of computer-mediated communication and tests how interpersonal and intergroup dynamics shape attitudes, relationships, and online hate in mediated interaction.

Studies the neural mechanisms of responses to media narratives, including moral conflict, persuasion, media violence, and flow, and analyzes moral narratives in news and entertainment.

Merges ecocritical theory with analysis of contemporary media, developing ecological frameworks for understanding and designing video games.

Studies underrepresented media histories of energy, cities, and infrastructure in the Middle East, especially oil-industry documentary films in Iran and Iraq.

Studies the digital divide, especially disruptions in device access, and how technology-mediated social support affects identity and well-being among disadvantaged communities.

Studies how political expression on social media can stimulate political engagement, improve intergroup relations, and reduce political inequality.

Studies health message effects and risky health decisions such as youth vaping, using surveys, online and eye-tracking experiments, computational text analysis, and neuroimaging.

Merges digital art practice, feminist decolonial thought, and critical AI to study Arab digital cultures, data, and archives, building media systems such as R-Shief.

Studies media history and theory, science and technology studies, and sound studies, using cultural and critical history to examine forensic media, accidents, and unexplained sounds.

Studies the history, theory, and criticism of Latin American film and digital media, including Cuban cinema, the state and digital culture, and digital activism.

Studies film theory and Japanese cinema, tracing Japan's role in the global circulation of film theory through Marxist criticism and cultural history.

Uses experiments to study human memory, cognition, and metacognitive monitoring and control when people think with digital technologies.

Studies team collaboration, examining how diversity, communication processes, and human-machine teaming shape collective intelligence and team performance, including neurodiversity at work.

Studies the history of computing and politics in the postwar U.S., tracing how computing was deployed against the urban crisis and reshaped racial politics and policy.

Studies how identity, race, and information shape U.S. political processes, focusing on Latinx populations, immigration, and news portrayals of immigrant children.

Studies how political humor and satire affect democratic participation and news sharing in the U.S. and South Asia, using survey experiments, network analysis, and neuroimaging.

Studies how communities and AI agents organize collective action in disaster response and recovery, using network analysis, generative agent-based modeling, and discourse analysis.

Studies silent cinema and precinematic visual culture, analyzing the entanglement of police power and motion pictures through historical research, Black studies, and essay filmmaking.