Annual Symposium Schedule Participants
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Faculty Mentors
Deen Freelon is the Allan Randall Freelon Sr. Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and an empirical researcher of political communication who focuses on digital politics. He is interested in mis/disinformation, conspiracy theories, hyperpartisan content, ideological asymmetry, identity politics, and personalized information environments. As a member of the computational social science community, he writes a fair amount of code for data analysis (mostly in R and Python), some of which he releases on an open-source basis.
Twitter/X: @dfreelon
Logan Rae Gomez
Logan Rae Gomez (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Critical/Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication. Logan’s research interests and specializations are in rhetorical theory & criticism, Black feminism, critical race studies, gendered violence, and social movements. You can find their work published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and First Amendment Studies.
Rachel GriffinRachel Griffin is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. Her research takes a critical/cultural approach to issues related to race, ethnicity, and gender.
Avery serves as Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. He is also Co-Coordinator of Research for the University’s UCEER Center, which focuses on genetic communication and is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Additionally, he is the Vice-Head of the Council of Divisions for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). He previously served as an Associate Chair for the Department and was the University’s longest-standing Student Media Advisor (2016-2023). His research engages digital and social media, mental health and well-being in the media, and constructs of health, identity and ability. Avery was selected in 2018-2020 as a Vice President's Clinical and Translational Research Scholar. He concurrently served as the Journalism Sequence Coordinator in the Department of Communication and was selected as a Digital Journalism Research Fellow with Oslo Metropolitan University in 2019.
Twitter/X: @averyholton
Josephine ("Jo") Lukito is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media. She is also the Director of the Media & Democracy Data Cooperative and a Senior Faculty Research Affiliate for the Center for Media Engagement. Jo uses mixed methods and computational approaches to study political language in the information ecology, focusing especially on harmful digital content (e.g., mis/disinformation, hate speech) across multiple platforms. Her work has been published in journals such as Political Communication and Social Media + Society, and she has contributed work to Wired and Columbia Journalism Review.
Twitter/X: @josephinelukito
Shannon C. McGregor (PhD, University of Texas – Austin) is an associate professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media and a principal investigator at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life – both at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is an award-winning and internationally recognized communication scholar whose research addresses the role of media and social media in political processes, with a focus on the interplay of three groups essential to a functioning democracy: politicians, journalists, and the public. McGregor’s interdisciplinary and mixed-method research has been published across fields including top journals in communication, political science, and sociology, and she is co-editor of a forthcoming book with Oxford University Press – Media and January 6th. She writes often for the public press, and her work appears in outlets such as The Washington Post, Wired, and The Guardian.
Twitter/X: @shannimcg
Graduate Student Presenters
Eugene Brown Agyei is a doctoral student at Michigan Technological University. His research interests include communication studies and new media technologies across, Africa and how they intersect with identity and social justice. Currently, Eugene is using a mixed methods approach to analyze the dynamics, structure and influence of social networks in Africa.
Before starting his doctoral studies, Eugene worked as a fact-checking journalist at the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) and later at the Center for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID) in Ghana. He has more than six years of experience in creating digital content for various organizations as well as freelancing for both local and international publications. Eugene also holds a Master of Philosophy (MPhil) Degree in Communication Studies from the University of Ghana with a specialization in Advertising and Journalism.
Twitter/X: @obibasikapa
Barbara HoweBarbara Howe had a career working in political communications in Washington DC before returning to graduate school for a PhD in Politics and International Affairs. She is now a PhD candidate at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Her dissertation is on how authoritarian states use Western social media. She is interested in using narrative analysis of governmental Twitter and Facebook accounts to understand how these states are using ideational power to challenge the greater material power of the US and NATO.
Ke “Maddie” Huang-Isherwood is a licensed attorney and social science scholar. Her research areas are at the intersection of communication and law, which include social media, gamification, identity, social capital, and social movements. Huang-Isherwood employs communication network and media psychology theories, and quantitative and computational methodologies. She has presented her scholarship at the International Communication Association conferences, the Trust & Safety Research Conference, and the Peter G. Hall Conference on Statistics and Machine Learning, and (co-)authored peer-reviewed publications at Computers in Human Behavior, Frontiers in Psychology, Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, Revista Internacional de Sociología, among others.
As a Portuguese national of Chinese descent who has resided in the United States for over a decade, Huang-Isherwood is experienced in mentoring and teaching students of diverse backgrounds. She has advanced degrees in film and television (UCLA, MFA, 2010), law (University of Minnesota Twin Cities, JD, 2015), and communication (UC Davis, MA, 2019), as well as relevant professional experiences, and, as such, is exceptionally qualified to counsel students pursuing various professional and research goals.
Twitter/X: @HuangIsherwood
Yu Jeong HWANG is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on political communication and social media. She is interested in hate speech online including misogyny, and how it interacts with political communication. Yu Jeong also explores the area of health communication with an emphasis on how partisanship and politics affect health-related decisions.
Before joining the University of Arizona, Yu Jeong worked in South Korean politics for ten years as an advisor, building most of her career in the National Assembly. She served various national-level election campaigns including presidential ones as a PR officer in charge of social media campaigns.
She holds a master’s degree in international relations from Peking University, China, and a bachelor’s degree in political science and diplomacy from Yonsei University, Korea.
Twitter: @hwangyujeong
Anna Yan Liu is a third year PhD candidate at the Institute of Communications Research (ICR) at Colledge of Media, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is interested in the social impact of quantification and datafication, with a particular focus on how audience measurements shape audiences’ behaviors, cultural production process and the global flow of cultural products. Anna focuses on the role of digital platforms as rising audience measurement regimes in the cultural industry. Her research explores how platform metrics and large-scale audience data influence cultural production by shaping both audiences’ behaviors and impacting content producers’ actions.
Currently, Anna is working on projects investigating how fan audiences proactively react to audience measurements on digital platforms through collectively devoting in “data labor”. Using a mixed-method approach, Anna employs computational tools to analyze large-scale, fan-generated data. She also does netnography and qualitatively interprets how fandom identities and practices are shaped by audience measurements.
Before joining the doctoral program, Anna worked in Ipsos, a marketing research company, as a senior research manager. She can be reached at yanliu10@illinois.edu.
Twitter/X: @AnnaaaaaaLiu
Sarah Nguyễn investigates information infrastructures and information disorder among immigrant diaspora and multilingual communities. They apply theory into practice at the intersections of critical information infrastructures, information disorder, embodied memories, archival studies, Asian American studies, and immigrant/refugee studies. Grounded in Black and Asian technocultures with feminist practices of care, Sarah centers contextual, archival, qualitative, and community participatory methodologies alongside social media analysis to better understand information transmission among diasporic communities. Currently, Sarah contributes to the NSF Rapid Response Research with UW Center for an Informed Public about problematic information discourses within the Vietnamese and Latine diaspora; and to the AfterLab on community archives in response to COVID-19. Her research has been featured in Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, VICE, BuzzFeed News, KUOW Public Radio, NPR, Saigon Broadcasting Television Network, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, and InDance magazine. Sarah is a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington's Information School.
Twitter/X: @snguyen_info
Sananda Sahoo is a PhD candidate in Media Studies at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, Western University, Canada. She looks at the intersections of public, public space, and digital infrastructures. Her previous research includes Internet shutdowns as biopolitics, platform politics as manifested through political posters, deepfakes and podcasts, questions of collective responsibility, sites of violence in the digital sphere, and colonial narratives in photographs and memoirs by women. She holds an MPhil in English Literature and master’s degrees in journalism and English Literature.
Twitter/X: @SanandaSahoo
Sneha Singh is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Auckland. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender studies, politics, media studies, and sociology. Her research amalgamates her master's training in Gender Studies from Central European University, Austria, and her undergraduate studies in Media and Journalism from the University of Delhi, India. Her PhD project focuses on the women activists of Indian origin in New Zealand, particularly, how they operate within an environment marked with a rise of Hindu nationalism in Indian diasporic spaces. The project seeks to (re)conceptualize the idea of “digital citizenship” by understanding (digital) activist practices of women in the Indian diaspora in Aotearoa New Zealand. She is trained in feminist methodologies and uses feminist ethnographic and participatory action methods for her research.
Twitter/X: @SnehaSi73774266