From the mid-90s to the present, television drama with religious content has come to reflect the growing cultural divide between white middle-America and concentrated urban elites. As author Charlotte E. Howell argues in this forthcoming book, by 2016, television narratives of white Christianity had become entirely disconnected from the religion they were meant to represent. […]
This week, communication scholars, practitioners, and educators from around the world are congregating in Toronto, Canada for the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC)’s 102nd annual conference. Many members of the BU COM community—including some of the CRC’s research fellows—will be in attendance to share their scholarly work and convene with colleagues around […]
Truth qualities of journalism are under intense scrutiny in today’s world. Journalistic scandals have eroded public confidence in mainstream media while pioneering news media compete to satisfy the public’s appetite for news. Still worse is the specter of “fake news” that looms over media and political systems that underpin everything from social stability to global […]
As Boston University begins to invest its resources and expertise in the emergent field broadly referred to as “big data,” BU Today has published a multipart series exploring the promises, consequences, and future of data science. Part Five of this series—titled “Big Data, Big Impact”—features insights from two of the CRC’s faculty fellows, Lei Guo […]
Recently, the Communication Research Center received an unexpected and exciting email. Attached was a scanned copy of the first-ever CRC newsletter, published in November of 1959 (the year the CRC was established). We are so thrilled to have this documentation of the CRC’s rich history and hope you enjoy learning about the center’s early research […]
Dr. Melvin DeFleur, a former professor of communication at Boston University and renowned communications scholar, was posthumously awarded the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC)’s Eleanor Blum Distinguished Service to Research Award. Dr. DeFleur conducted pioneering academic research in the communications field, authoring over a dozen books—including the widely-cited textbook “Theories of Mass […]
A New York Times article about the changing nature of our digital experiences cites a recently-published paper in Human-Computer Interaction co-authored by the CRC’s Jim Cummings. The concept of “screen time” has been long used to understand how—and for how long—individuals interact with their devices. But as more applications have become available to internet users, understanding people’s digital […]
Many CRC fellows will be attending the 69th annual International Communication Association conference, which is taking place from May 24th to May 29th in Washington, D.C. COM scholars and faculty will be presenting their recent research projects in interactive poster sessions, panels, and paper sessions. Below is a list of upcoming ICA presentations by CRC-affiliated […]
Patrice Oppliger’s latest book, Tweencom girls: Gender and adolescence in Disney and Nickelodeon Sitcoms, is now available via Rowan & Littlefield. Dissecting popular Nickelodeon and Disney Channel programs, Oppliger—a CRC fellow and Assistant Professor of Communication at Boston University—offers a critical take on how girls in the transition between pre-teen and teenage have been represented in mainstream […]
In today’s ever-shifting online media landscape, “native advertising”—sponsored content that is integrated into a publication without being readily recognizable as promotional—has become increasingly commonplace across digital news platforms. The question then arises: How do individuals perceive native advertisements and are they able to differentiate them from non-promotional editorial content? Michelle Amazeen (Assistant Professor in BU’s […]