Jackie Chan Chen
I am a second year PhD student with research interests in online political communication as well as media literacy. My current research projects deal with online political participation during Presidential elections. I am also interested in political assimilation and acculturation among newly settled immigrants and their usage of Internet during the process.
Rebecca R. Donaway
Kyle Lorenzano
I am a second year PhD student with interests in political communication, media effects, and social/protest movements. Currently, I have been working on projects concerning the relationship between media use and political efficacy, and the effect of community structure on portrayals of Occupy Wall Street & the Tea Party’s legitimacy. In addition, I’m also interested in the question of whether the general public makes meaningful distinctions between media portrayals of protest movements as being Astroturf (a fake grassroots movement) versus those same movements being organized by Public Advocacy Consultants, which are something of a gray area between grassroots movements and Astroturf.
Miles Sari
I’m a first year master’s student in the Murrow College with research interests in media framing and news narrative analysis, communication ethics and journalism in the contemporary media landscape. My most recent work includes a comparative framing analysis of mainstream and citizen journalism coverage of the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi, which sparked the Tunisian Revolution and the greater Arab Spring. This co-authored paper was presented at the Media and the Arab Spring conference at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, and is being prepared for submission to a special edition of the Global Media Journal.
David E. Silva
I’m a first year PhD student in the Murrow College. My research interests focus on online media and computer mediated communication as it applies to political discourse. A few previous research projects include perception of time and motivation while task-switching. I am currently working on civility research in online political discussions and perception of bias in online news. I find the diversity of online settings, in both function and design, supremely interesting and hope to promote deliberative dialogue through my research. My thesis and dissertation both address this goal while my side projects address other online discussion topics.
Samuel Rhodes
Yiran Wang
Yiran (Meredith) Wang is a first year PhD student interested in political communication.