University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Theorizes how media platforms in India and the United States empower civic protest and expression, integrating agenda-setting and agenda-melding concepts.

Studies sports, race, and media, focusing on Black athlete activism and the sport justice movement in the era of #BlackLivesMatter.

Studies how subtle features of media messages and media-choice motivations shape thoughts and behavior, including food marketing to children and young adults' sexual health.

Studies how identity shapes health communication and behavior-change efforts, testing digital health interventions for underserved populations and linking health messaging to workplace inclusion.

Studies the Congo carnival performance tradition of an Afro-Latin community in Portobelo, Panama as a Black feminist performance studies scholar, through scholarship, digital humanities, and fiction.

Practices and teaches photojournalism, video, and documentary multimedia storytelling, leading international student documentary projects.

Studies First Amendment law, media and technology policy, and comparative U.S.-EU approaches to academic freedom, free expression, and AI regulation.

Brings public relations agency and corporate practice to teaching public relations, crisis communication, and strategic writing.

Studies representations of gender, race, sexuality, and class in historical and contemporary media, including news coverage of sex trafficking and oral histories of journalists.

Studies the role of technology in advertising, advertising's place in society, and environmental communication.

Studies how exemplification in journalism shapes issue perceptions and the effects of media images of sexual minorities, including public opinion on same-sex marriage.

Studies media content, uses, and effects among children, adolescents, and families, focusing on body image, eating, health, and neurodivergent children's media use.

Makes documentary films and teaches photojournalism and documentary storytelling, including films on environmental and farming subjects broadcast on public television.

Studies political communication, digital platforms, and democracy, including media and the January 6 attack and the political strategies of leaders such as Trump and Orbán.

Designs and evaluates visual and social media health messages and campaigns for cancer prevention, cancer support, and wellness promotion, drawing on media effects research.

Studies international public relations and public diplomacy, including foreign governments' PR spending in the U.S. and its news effects, and Japanese and Korean diplomacy.

Studies the social and cultural dimensions of surveillance systems, focusing on racial and gender inequalities, including AI surveillance in higher education.

Designs, implements, and evaluates health messages and campaigns, focusing on cancer prevention and tobacco control, in grant-funded studies testing communication strategies.

Produces motion graphics and explanatory videos and pioneered collegiate courses in motion graphics journalism and visual communication.

Conducts community-based participatory research on communication for social justice, examining race, gender, power, and catalytic leadership in communities and organizations.

Studies experimental performance and the aesthetics of political intervention, including Mary Overlie's Six Viewpoints and Paul Robeson's Cold War performance, as scholar and artist.

Focuses on local news sustainability and the digital transformation of news organizations, drawing on newsroom executive experience and international consulting.

Studies the intersection of law, technology, and society, focusing on freedom of expression, intellectual property, privacy, and technology governance.

Focuses on journalism and digital media education amid technological change, drawing on experience as a journalist and dean; no specific research agenda is described.

Creates electronic and interactive media artworks that investigate how information technology shapes lived experience, cognition, and sensory perception.

Studies media industries and transmedia brand licensing, examining how licensing professionals extend entertainment franchises into consumer products for children and fans.

Trains broadcast journalists in storytelling and cross-platform sports and news coverage, drawing on a career in local television news.

Studies crisis, disaster, and health communication on social media among diverse cultural groups using computational methods including LLMs, machine learning, and network analysis.

Studies how social media shapes strategic communication, especially health and crisis communication, and how publics view corporate social responsibility and organization-public relationships.

Studies how journalists produce and use dynamic visual communication such as information graphics and animation to help audiences comprehend complex news.

Focuses on news editing, reporting, and writing practice and journalism education, drawing on newspaper copy-editing experience and work on AP style guidance.

Studies ethical decision-making by public relations practitioners and journalists, along with professionalism, social responsibility, and the impact of DEI initiatives.

Examines anti-Black and brown racism, Black diaspora experience, and coloniality through performance and cultural studies, focusing on storytelling, surveillance, and liberation.

Studies race and political communication, focusing on Black Twitter and the rise of digital counternarratives.

Reports and writes on race, poverty, and Latino immigration in rural Southern U.S. towns as an investigative journalist and author.

Examines PR, advertising, and strategic communication measurement, focusing on audience segmentation and niche audiences in a fragmented media environment.

Studies organizing for social change, nonprofit accountability, meaningful work, and labor politics in the U.S. food system from critical organizational and feminist perspectives.

Brings practitioner experience in sports public and community relations for professional athletes to teaching sports communication.

Makes expressionistic documentary films on empathy, attention, and bearing witness, including a series on U.S. healthcare inequities and a poetic film on plants and their caretakers.

Studies advertising, interactive media, and media agenda setting, publishing in journalism and mass communication journals.

Studies belief, doubt, and speculation around AI, prediction, surveillance, and self-tracking, tracing the historical styles of reasoning behind claims about data-driven technologies.

Brings technology branding and marketing industry experience to teaching new media's impact on advertising, marketing, PR, and personal branding.

Prototypes and deploys AI, computer vision, robotics, and immersive technologies, exploring how they reshape organizations, industries, and higher education.

Theorizes publics and public discourse through rhetorical theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, including religious discourse in Islam and Evangelical Christianity.

Studies organizational ethics, corporate social responsibility, and the relationship between work and identity using interpretive, critical, and post-structuralist perspectives.

Studies media socialization, audiences, race, and gender, and collects oral histories of Black journalists who covered the Civil Rights Movement.

Studies the role of media and social media in political processes, focusing on interplay among politicians, journalists, and the public, using mixed methods.

Studies the history and political economy of advertising and adtech, tracing how efforts to predict consumer behavior and sell audience attention fueled data-driven surveillance.

Studies the political economy of popular culture and everyday technology, including labor ethnography of the vinyl record supply chain after digitization.

Conducts applied user experience and design research, using eye tracking in usability studies to understand user behavior with digital interfaces and news design.

Studies how smart-city technologies, algorithms, and infrastructure intersect with urban governance, policing, inequality, and the financialization of everyday life.

Studies identity, postcolonial politics, and popular culture, examining how racialized identification and affective appeals shape the security state, migration, and belonging.

Teaches journalism drawing on a decade of online newsroom leadership; the profile lists no specific research focus.

Studies the social and political functions of hate speech, including its role in hate crime, ethnoviolence, and White privilege, and the features of anti-hate discourse.

Creates open-world games and machinima with game engines to explore an aesthetics of computational performance, with interests in media studies, gender, feminism, and sexuality.

Focuses on the future of leadership communication, disruption in public relations and integrated marketing communication, stakeholder trust, and digital influence.

Brings practitioner expertise in brand strategy, account planning, and data-driven consumer insights to advertising and strategic communication teaching.

Works in rhetorical studies; the department profile gives no further detail on specific research topics or methods.

Uses (auto)ethnographic methods to study identity, sexuality, shame, and economic insecurity in organizations, social movements, and food assistance programs.

Works on front-end web development, data visualization, augmented reality, photogrammetry, and generative art, drawing on investigative reporting experience.

Practices and teaches community journalism and storytelling on faith, identity, and the Black experience, editing a community-based Durham news publication.

Produces documentary, immersive, and cross-platform stories for journalism, advocacy, and nonprofits, and writes nonfiction on identity, memory, and immigration.

Studies the cultural politics of infrastructure, economic nationalism, and green capitalism in Turkey, drawing on critiques of political economy, affect theory, and environmental humanities.

Practices investigative journalism and photojournalism exposing corruption, fraud, and human rights abuses in Latin America and along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Studies internal public relations, focusing on leader-employee communication, emerging technology, and well-being in authentic, ethical workplaces.

Brings corporate communications leadership experience to questions of the chief communications officer role, data-driven communication strategy, and stakeholder capitalism.

Uses critical rhetorical analysis to study how communities renegotiate collective identity and futures in response to environmental crises, sustainability debates, and urban planning.

Makes experimental, narrative, and essay films that challenge reductive narratives about immigration, nationality, and sexuality, often centered on the MENA region and its diasporas.