Number 2, Year 2, Spring 2017
Dear CRDM community
(faculty, affiliated faculty, students, and alumni),
It’s with great pleasure I present you with the CRDM 2017 Spring newsletter! The first issue of the program’s newsletter was released last year, and I hope this is a tradition that will continue for years to come.
Since my appointment as the CRDM Director is coming to an end, I would like to take some time to look back and highlight a few of the program’s accomplishments during these past three years. First and foremost, the program gained a new website. Following the new University design templates, and CHASS IT’s CMS, the CRDM administrative team worked with Reify Media, student workers Fernanda Duarte, Peter Kudenov, Sarah Evans and Mark Bentley, the students in the CRDM Colloquium class of 2015, and the CRDM committee to bring a new look to the program’s website, which was originally created in 2005. We have included new relevant information and reorganized the contents of the site to better serve the CRDM community and prospective students. The new site was launched in Spring 2015, and below you will able to see the most recent updates from this 16-17 academic year.
The CRDM administrative team has also worked diligently in trying to make the advising process and students’ path towards finishing the CRDM curriculum and program clearer and more straightforward. We have developed faculty workshops to make faculty (especially new faculty) aware of the intricacies of the CRDM curriculum and the timeline towards graduation. Each student now has a Google spreadsheet checklist in which they and their advisor can more clearly understand how many credit hours they have taken, how many are missing, and what core courses and electives they need to take). We have also developed a new student assessment mechanism that helps to connect students with their advisors and help to make advisors aware of the student’s progress in all spheres of academic life — academic milestones, teaching/research, and professional development.
Another accomplishment I would like to highlight is the newly established Alumni Award and Dissertation Award, which were created with the intent of forging new alumni relationships.
I would like to thank all of those who helped make these achievements possible. A big thanks to the (past and present) CRDM Program Associates, Mya Nguyen (August 2014 – May 2016) and Jeff Leonard (June 2016 – until the present — and future!). Thanks to David Rieder, the Associate Director, who in addition to his regular task as Associate Director stepped in as the interim director during my maternity leave in the Fall 2016. And thanks to Sarah Stein, who stepped in as interim Associate Director during the Fall 2016 as well. I also wish to express my gratitude to the CRDM committee, Helen Burgess, Paul Fyfe, Nick Taylor, Steve Wiley (and also formerly Chris Anson and Jeremy Packer). In addition, the following student representatives were also critical in helping grow the program’s connection with the student body: Katreena Alder and Kendra Andrews (current representatives) and former representatives Chelsea Hampton and Chris Kampe, and Melissa Adams and Gwendolynne Reid.
Please help me in welcoming the new CRDM administrative team, David Rieder (DGP), Nick Taylor (Associate Director), and Jeff Leonard (Program Associate).
I wish you all a great rest of your summer!
Adriana de Souza e Silva
CRDM Director (2014-2017)
2016-2017 New Faculty!
We would like to welcome Dr. Grant Bollmer, Dr. Franklin Cason, Dr. Dana Gierdowski, and Dr. Nicole Lee into the core faculty for CRDM!
Dr. Grant Bollmer studies the history and theory of digital media, with a particular focus on social media platforms, infrastructure, and software. His most recent research examines empathy and affect, both in the history of psychological research and in a range of digital media, from virtual reality and video games to facial recognition software and social media.
Dr. Franklin Cason is a filmmaker and film scholar, who has taught courses in film theory, history, aesthetics, criticism, and analysis. His research interests have been primarily concerned with film, modern visual culture, and media studies. As such, his writing and artistic practice reaches across the disciplines of art history, film studies, digital multimedia, graphic novels, philosophy, sociology, literature, musicology, aesthetic theory, visual studies, and historical poetics.
Dr. Dana Gierdowski explores how innovative learning spaces impact student writers and instructors. She teaches first-year, advanced undergraduate, and graduate courses in Composition and provides administrative support to the First-Year Writing Program.
Dr. Nicole Lee’s research focuses on the intersection of science communication, public relations and digital media. Her primary program of research examines how public relations practitioners can utilize online dialogue to more effectively communicate about science with lay audiences. She is particularly interested in communication about politically polarized topics such as climate change.
2017 CRDM Symposium
The CRDM’s program annual symposium, The Remix: Multimedia and Intersectionality in Culture, Communication and the Academy, ran from March 24th to the 25th on the NCSU Campus. This year’s symposium was organized by a great team of students, Katreena Alder, Kendra Andrews, T. Mark Bentley, Desiree Dighton, Sarah Evans, Krystin Gollihue, Jessica Handloff, Jeonghyn Lee, Max Renner and TJ Morgan; and were advised by Dr. Chris Anson.
The 2017 CRDM Symposium sought both student and faculty contributions of papers, presentations, creative work, and digital projects in a wide range of formats and from various disciplines following the theme of “the remix.” While the concept of “remix” has a history in popular culture, it also exists as a way of thinking more generally about how new objects and processes come into being through remediation or juxtaposition. Remix, in this sense, might apply to any interruption or remediation of the materials (media), ideas, and identities within academia or the larger society. What kind of research or praxis should we be doing to address these changes? How will we be remixing what we do in academia? How are we remixing the intersectional spaces we occupy? What does the remix mean for critical and communication theory?
The symposium hosted speakers from across the United States. The event featured keynote speaker, Dr. Adam Banks (Stanford University) “Intersectional Struggle on the 1s and 2s: The Activist as DJ Inside AND Outside the Academy.” In addition, Dr. Victoria Gallagher (NCSU) and Dr. Keon Pattiway (EMU) presented a featured project, “The vMLK Project: Crafting a Necessary (Digital) Space to Explore the Intersectionality of Rhetoric, Race, and Civic Transformation.” Featured speaker and CWSP Workshop Leader, Dr. Dan Melzer (UC Davis) presented “Remixing Writing Assignments for Multiple Literacies.” Dr. Keon Pettiway presented “Typecasting Blackness: Rhetoric, Race, and the Materiality of Typography.” Professor Darrell Stover (NCSU) presented, “The Remix Across Communities of Creativity.”
Future CRDM Symposia to look forward to:
This past year, in order to provide CRDM symposium organizers with more lead time, we solicited proposals for the three upcoming years’ symposia (2018, 2019, 2020). Each event will be run in conjunction with CRDM recruitment, via collaboration between that year’s organizers and the CRDM Associate Director.
The event in Spring 2018 will be hosted by Dr. Adriana de Souza e Silva, via a collaboration with the North Carolina chapter of the Internet Society. The conference’s theme is “Trust, Privacy and Inclusion”, addressing contemporary challenges to an open and safe Internet.
Dr. Jessica Jameson, Cynthia Zuckerman, and Dr. Elizabeth Nelson will host 2019’s symposium, tentatively titled “Constituting Constructive Conversations”. It will explore the potential of dialogue, across a variety of online and offline contexts, to overcome ideological polarization, particularly as it relates to our current political climate in North Carolina.
In 2020, Dr. Jean Goodwin will host the symposium, tentatively titled “Reconciliation Ecology and Environmental Communication in the Anthropocene”. This event will engage scholars and students in reconciliation ecology and environmental rhetoric, in a shared project of an ecological politics that moves beyond nature/culture divides.
Continue to check our website for updates!
Alumni Awards
This year CRDM is proud to announce two recipients of the Alumni Award!
Our first recipient is Dr. Kelly Martin. Dr. Martin graduated from the CRDM program in 2011. During her time in the PhD program, she published with a variety of faculty in the Departments of Communication and English as well as in the College of Design, including Dr. Melissa Johnson, Dr. Vicki Gallagher, and Dr. Ken Zagacki. She has also co-published with some of our alumni. Her research is truly interdisciplinary, and stands on the intersection of design, visual communication, visual rhetoric and instructional communication. She has published 14 peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters, a book review and 3 peer reviewed conference proceedings since graduating from the CRDM program. In addition, she is an investigator on two NSF grants, totaling $1.8 million. Finally, she serves on one editorial boards, as is a reviewer for additional six journals and presses. She is active in national professional organizations and was recently elected to the position of Vice Chair for NCA’s Visual Communication division.
Dr. Martin’s dissertation, defended in the Spring of 2011, was titled “Visual Research: Introducing a Schema for Methodologies and Contexts,” and her committee consisted of Victoria Gallagher (Chair), Meredith Davis (GSR), Melissa Johnson and Carolyn Miller.
Congratulations Dr. Martin!!!
Our second award went to Dr. Joshua Reeves. Dr. Reeves graduated from the CRDM in 2013, and since then has been hired in two-tenure-track positions. In the true CRDM interdisciplinary spirit, he teaches classes in media studies and rhetoric. The book that evolved from his dissertation, Citizen Spies: The Long Rise of America’s Surveillance Society, is due out with New York University Press this March, and he has another book manuscript (coauthored with Dr. Jeremy Packer, who was one of our faculty) already in a promising stage of review with Duke University Press. A look at his publications reveals how much he’s sustained a commitment to CRDM, having collaborated not just with Dr. Packer, but also with Dr. Chris Ingraham, another CRDM faculty member, as well as with former CRDM students. He is already an Associate Editor of the journal Surveillance and Society and is on the editorial board for the Southern Journal of Communication. He has been a reviewer for ten different journals and five divisions of national and regional conferences.
Dr. Reeves dissertation, defended in the Summer of 2013, was titled “If You See Something, Say Something: The Rhetoric of Surveillance in American Life.” His committee was composed by, His committee was composed by Jeremy Packer (Co-chair), Hans Kellner (Co-chair), Victoria Gallagher, Matt May, Mark Andrejevic, Gregory Young (GSR).
Congratulations Dr. Reeves!!!
Dissertation Award
Every Spring semester, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at NC State requests nominations for the year’s Dissertation Award. Since 2016, the CRDM committee ranks the Dissertations nominated to the CHASS award chooses its awardee as the top ranked nominee.
This year, the Dissertation Award was awarded to Dr. Elizabeth Pitts. Her dissertation, titled, “Distributing Biotechnology: (Re)Organizing DNA and Scientific Work,” was defended in December 2016. Dr. Pitts committee was composed by Jessica Jameson, Bill Kinsella, Susan Katz, Jason Delbourne, John Goodwin and Steve Katz.
Congratulations Dr. Pitts!
CHASS Dissertation Award
This year the CHASS Dissertation Award goes to Dr. Cristiane S. Damasceno. Her dissertation, titled, “Massive Courses Meet Local Communities: An Ethnography of Open Education Learning Circles,” was defended in March 2017. Her committee was composed by Deanna Dannels (chair), Adriana de Souza e Silva, Paul Fyfe, and Nick Taylor.
Congratulations Dr. Damasceno!!
CRDM Partnerships: New Collaborations with STS and LAS
The CRDM program is constantly building on partnerships with Departments and institutions in and outside the University. These partnerships give students the opportunity to conduct research in academic settings that go beyond teaching, and to learn valuable skills for their future professional lives.
This year, the CRDM program forged a new partnership with the Laboratory of Analytic Sciences (LAS), and expanded an already existing partnership with the IDS program at NC State.
LAS is a translational, collaborative research lab focused on the development of new analytic technology and analysis tradecraft. These new technologies and tradecraft will be brought together through the development of user experiences that allow engagement with the data, tools, and techniques to achieve mission outcomes. There are 50 intelligence community professionals stationed at NC State on Centennial Campus, and an additional 35 professors and 10 corporate partners. CRDM’s Graduate Extension Assistant (GEA) will work with government and/or industry partners to support the mission of LAS.The goal of the Science, Technology and Society (STS) program at NC State is to help students learn ways of thinking and conducting research that characterize the interdisciplinary science, technology and society field, and to relate these to larger human concerns. STS also enables students to explore complex STS topics by seeing them from multiple perspectives and in relation to other topics, and to integrate STS information and concepts from a variety of sources. Finally, STS provides students with the skills and resources to learn key STS concepts, literature, practices, and issues in order to encourage lifelong learning.
As a research assistant for the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences (LAS), Gwendolynne Reid worked with two multidisciplinary teams developing digital tools meant to support the intelligence community’s ability to productively analyze large volumes of diverse data. These teams included intelligence, industry, and academic partners, representing expertise in the social sciences, humanities, design, engineering, computer science, and other disciplinary areas. During her time at LAS, Gwendolynne worked primarily with Dr. Kathleen Vogel and fellow CRDM student Christopher Kampe to contribute qualitative research expertise and insight to two LAS projects: the Journaling Application, an instrumented workplace application, and the Smart Cities Project, a city planning tool. As part of these teams, Gwendolynne helped design, conduct, and analyze qualitative, ethnographic, and design-based research that included interviews, participant observation, trace ethnography, content analysis, and pragmatics analysis. As a CRDM student, Gwendolynne appreciated the opportunity to apply the theory and research methodologies she learned in the program to developing technologies and to contribute qualitative “thick data” to these projects in a way that might meaningfully impact future users and stakeholders of the technologies. Working on these projects challenged and refined her existing theoretical and methodological orientations and helped her gain a better sense of the unique expertise she could offer multidisciplinary and technical teams. Plus, she can now say she has interviewed NSA and CIA intelligence analysts, and that’s pretty cool too.
The goal of the Science, Technology and Society (STS) program at NC State is to help students learn ways of thinking and conducting research that characterize the interdisciplinary science, technology and society field, and to relate these to larger human concerns. STS also enables students to explore complex STS topics by seeing them from multiple perspectives and in relation to other topics, and to integrate STS information and concepts from a variety of sources. Finally, STS provides students with the skills and resources to learn key STS concepts, literature, practices, and issues in order to encourage lifelong learning.
Besides teaching classes such as Introduction to STS (STS 214) , and Special Topics in STS (STS 490), students may also work as advisors in in the Interdisciplinary Studies (IDS) and Science, Technology and Society (STS) programs at NC State. Students working with the IDS and STS programs will also have the possibility of creating new courses for the programs, with approval.
CRDM Website News
This Spring, we have updated the CRDM website and added several new features. We invite you to take a look at some of these pages, to find out the great work CRDM faculty and students are doing:
– CRDM faculty are highly productive scholars and frequently work in collaboration with CRDM students to publish in a variety of scholarly venues. The CRDM home page has a comprehensive list of publications from CRDM core faculty during the 2016-2017 academic year. The publications co-authored with CRDM students are highlighted in bold.
– There is a new tab on the main navigation bar, called “CRDM Happenings.” This tab includes links to the CRDM symposia, Newsletter, Awards and Student Blog.
– Check out the publications that came out of each CRDM symposia by clicking on the links below their titles!
– Given the CRDM new partnerships and externally funded positions, we have also updated this page.
CRDM Dissertation Defenses in the 2016-2017 Academic Year
CRDM is proud of the following students for completing their dissertations. To read more on each dissertation click on their dissertation title to be redirected to their work posted on NCSU Library site.
Alexander Monea
Title: “Numerical Mediation and American Governmentality”
Dissertation Defense: May 2016
Committee: Jeremy Packer (Chair), Helen Burgess (GSR), Mark Hansen, Mark Olson
Keon Pattiway
Title: “A New African in the World: A Rhetorical Study of Kwame Nkrumah’s Visual Strategy for Shaping PostColonial Nationhood”
Dissertation Defense: July 2016
Committee: Victoria Gallagher (Chair), Melissa Johnson, Sarah Stein, Rebecca Walsh, Own Kalinge (GSR)
Chelsea Hampton
Title: “Under Control: Mediating Diabetes”
Dissertation Defense: August 2016
Committee: Jeremy Packer (Chair), Stephen Wiley, Rebecca Walsh, Helen Burgess (GSR)
Emily Jones
Title: “The Positive Vibe: Cultivating and Communicating a Positive Culture in the Restaurant Industry”
Dissertation Defense: August 2016
Committee: Melissa Johnson (Chair), Michael Gamcsik (GSR), James Kiwanuka-Tondo, Christopher Anson, Jessica Jameson
Elizabeth Pitts
Title: “Distributing Biotechnology: (Re)Organizing DNA and Scientific Work”
Dissertation Defense: November 2016
Committee: Jessica Jameson (Co-chair), William Kinsella (Co-chair), Susan Katz, John Goodwin (GSR), Jason Delborne, Steven Katz
Elizabeth Typhina
Title: “Mobile Phones and Environmentalism”
Dissertation Defense: February 2017
Committee: Jason Swarts (Chair), William Kinsella, Jason Delborne, Kofi Boone, Robert Bardon (GSR)
Cristiane Damasceno
Title: “Massive Courses Meet Local Communities: An Ethnography of Open Education Learning Circles”
Dissertation Defense: March 2017
Committee: Deanna Dannels (Chair), Adriana de Souza e Silva, Nick Taylor, Paul Fyfe, Brad Mehlenbacher (GSR)
John J Sylvia
Title: “Posthuman Media Studies: An Affirmative Approach to Informational Ontology, Big Data, and Processes of Subjectivation”
Dissertation Defense: May 2017
Committee: Steve Wiley (Chair), N. Katherine Hayles, Jeremy Packer, Andrew Johnston, Rosi Braidotti, Madhusudan Katti, Jose Paten (GSR)
Newsletter Credits:
CRDM Director: Dr. Adriana de Souza e Silva
CRDM Associate Director: Dr. David Rieder
CRDM Program Associate: Jeffrey Leonard
Research & Writing (CRDM Student Worker): María Asunción Tudela