Story by Andrew Thurston Just after Christmas, a Wisconsin pharmacist attempted to destroy 570 doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, yanking precious vials from a storage refrigerator. According to multiple reports, he’d become convinced it could alter human DNA. It can’t. Nor, as other false rumors have claimed, will it allow the government to track you […]
Congratulations to Jiaxi Wu, CRC graduate fellow and rising third-year student in the Emerging Media Studies doctoral program! She has just been awarded a two-year $100,000 fellowship from the American Heart Association’s Tobacco Center for Regulatory Sciences. Dr. Traci Hong (COM) and Dr. Jessica Fetterman (Medicine) will be co-mentors and direct the core research studies […]
“The Dark Side of Stand-Up Comedy,” a new book co-edited by Patrice Oppliger (CRC fellow) and Eric Shouse, is now available for purchase. This book focuses on the “dark side” of stand-up comedy, initially inspired by speculations surrounding the death of comedian Robin Williams. Contributors, those who study humor as well as those who perform […]
*Update: While this schedule remains the same, the conference will now be taking place virtually (not in Australia, as previously planned).* This May, communication scholars from around the globe will convene for the International Communication Association’s 70th annual conference, including several of the CRC’s fellows. As the program has recently been made available, we’ve compiled […]
In a project conducted for the State House News Service, CRC researchers used biometric methods to measure potential voters’ subconscious responses to candidates running in this year’s presidential election. Utilizing galvanic skin response (GSR), facial expression analysis, eye tracking, and self-report survey data, researchers Susie Blair, Anne Danehy, and Mina Tsay-Vogel designed a study to […]
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 […]