Programs › Madison, WI
Studies rhetoric and democratic practice, analyzing public discourse, law, and policy on school choice, public education, and structural racism through rhetorical criticism.
Studies French and transnational film history, filmmakers' creative processes, and women in the film industry through historical research and film analysis, plus digital humanities work.
Studies journalism and media ethics, First Amendment and campus free expression, and the ethical implications of emerging technologies like VR, drones, and AI in news.
Studies the history and geography of information labor, from telegraph messengers to captioning and metadata workers, using historical and geographical methods.
Studies television audiences, streaming viewing, TV comedy, and media dislike and taste through cultural studies of audience experience.
Creates feature, documentary, and experimental films and studies race and representation in filmmaking and movie marketing.
Studies vernacular expression and authority online, including firearms discourse, algorithms, and AI, using rhetorical, critical cultural, and performance theory.
Studies film and broadcasting history and the trade press, using data mining and digital humanities tools to build and analyze media history archives.
Studies media industries and production cultures across television, film, games, comics, and merchandising, using critical media industry studies to examine franchising and labor.
Studies the rhetoric of health, medicine, and science, including disability, neuroscience, bioethics, and light pollution, through rhetorical and historical analysis.
Studies digital political campaigns, microtargeting, and disinformation on platforms, using a user-based ad tracking tool to reverse engineer political ad targeting.
Studies how Asian Americans engage with media as audiences, producers, and activists, focusing on representation, diaspora media industries, and race and digital media.
Studies positive and developmental media effects, including prosocial and educational media, family co-use of media, and youth identity development such as LGBTQ identities.
Studies migration, asylum, and foreign policy rhetoric in the Americas, using rhetorical analysis of law and policy alongside qualitative field-based methods.
Studies news framing and its effects on audiences and public opinion, especially news coverage of social protests and the protest paradigm.
Studies how new technologies such as streaming, podcasts, software, and generative AI reshape music and sound industries and everyday cultural production.
Studies press freedom and human rights media, including war correspondents, local fixers, and press freedom advocacy groups, from a qualitative humanist perspective.
Studies media violence, media enjoyment, and narrative entertainment effects on children, adolescents, and adults, documenting violent content and its audience impact.
Studies how journalists and newsrooms build trust with audiences through engagement practices, using applied research and evaluation of newsroom interventions.
Studies political communication, public opinion, and social mobilization via new technologies, examining perceived media influence and democracy across countries.
Studies political and health communication, linking media effects and framing with computational social science to examine polarization, civic engagement, and health support.
Studies film music and sound, cognitive film theory, and the history of the American film industry through historical and interpretive analysis of Hollywood films.
Studies how group discussion, advice, language use, and chatbot partners shape persuasion and acceptance of information, including environmental issues like climate change and PFAS.
Studies how communication technologies such as online dating, social network sites, and AI shape self-presentation, deception, well-being, and relationships.
Studies how people's information environments shape beliefs, policy preferences, and participation, using panel surveys, experiments, content analysis, and interviews.
Studies neurocognitive mechanisms of persuasion and social influence, combining social neuroscience and communication methods to predict behavior change.
Studies online conspiracy movements such as QAnon and extremist beliefs, tracing their rhetorical and epistemological dynamics with historical and digital humanities methods.
Studies twentieth-century US political and journalism history, focusing on gender, foreign policy, and Washington news culture through archival research.
Studies South Asian film and media, soft-porn cinema, gender and sexuality, and migrant media through historical and cultural analysis of postcolonial visual cultures.
Studies US presidential rhetoric and foreign policy discourse, especially during the Cold War, through rhetorical criticism and historical analysis.
Studies message effects and persuasion in digital health and science communication using experiments, multimodal content analysis, causal machine learning, and persuasive AI.
Studies selfies, digital image culture, platforms, viral nationalism, and South Asian media and pornographies through critical cultural analysis.
Studies political information exposure and effects on the open web and private messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram using computational social science and software tools.
Studies how journalists and news organizations adopt AI and build open-source tools for the public interest, examining newsroom ethics and responsible AI practices.
Studies the digital Black press and Black news audiences using interviews, focus groups, content analysis, and web metrics on news production and consumption.
Studies how social media, smartphones, algorithms, and AI affect well-being, designing theory-based interventions with surveys, field experiments, and NLP.
Studies Latinx media, girlhood, and media industries through critical cultural, intersectional, and political economy analysis, including theme park ethnography.
Studies sports media, athlete activism, and sports-based games such as fantasy sports and betting through a media and cultural studies lens on power and ideology.
Studies global communication, Muslim publics, Chinese diaspora media, feminist knowledge, and podcasts and online forums through anthropological and interdisciplinary approaches.
Studies how racial experiences and health communication shape medical mistrust among Black Americans, testing effects of news about racism on health outcomes.