{"id":4234,"date":"2021-12-20T15:22:17","date_gmt":"2021-12-20T20:22:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/crc\/?p=4234"},"modified":"2024-02-02T15:54:07","modified_gmt":"2024-02-02T20:54:07","slug":"letter-from-the-director-december-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/crc\/2021\/12\/20\/letter-from-the-director-december-2021\/","title":{"rendered":"Letter from the Director: December 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"

As 2021 draws to a close, I asked some of our CRC Fellows to reflect on the last 12 months and share what was most noteworthy to them in the realm of communication research.<\/span><\/p>\n

Two of our Fellows observed an increased emphasis on communication efforts for social change. For Assistant Professor of Public Relations <\/span>Rosalynn Vasquez<\/span><\/a>, who examines corporate sustainability and advocacy communications, she found the growth of social impact communications and the growth of JEDI (justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion) practice groups among PR agencies and in-house practitioners most interesting and something to keep an eye on. \u201cThere is a growing need for communication leaders to take the lead in defining and discussing diversity, equity, & inclusion in organizations,\u201d she said. \u201cWords matter and ensuring consistency and clarity will be crucial when communicating with internal and external stakeholders.\u201d A similar observation was made by Assistant Professor <\/span>Yi Grace Ji,<\/span><\/a> who is a strategic communication researcher. While previously it was primarily health communication scholars that focused on communication for social good, over the last year Ji has noticed more advertising and public relations practitioners looking to see how they can align their programs with social change efforts. \u201cStudents are gravitating toward this, as well,\u201d said Ji.<\/span><\/p>\n

For Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Studies <\/span>James Cummings<\/span><\/a>, who studies media psychology and human-computer interaction, what was noteworthy was the increasingly mainstream discussion of virtual spaces and remote interactions. Most notable was the announcement of Meta, as a not just a corporate rebranding by Facebook, but a declaration by one of the world\u2019s leading media firms that their vision of the near-term future is immersive virtual experiences. The envisioned scenarios in which our conventional \u201c2D\u201d media interactions\u00a0 are integrated with VR and AR experiences poses all sorts of interesting considerations, both theoretical (in terms of classic approaches to studying message processing and effects, like excitation transfer, priming, and source attribution), as well as ethical (Meta is funding researchers to help them design a safe, inclusive, privacy-preserving \u201cmetaverse\u201d).<\/span><\/p>\n

For me, it was noteworthy that this year\u2019s Nobel Peace Prize winners were <\/span>journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitri Andreyevich Muratov<\/span><\/a> for their efforts to defend freedom of speech and protect democracies from \u2013 as Ressa put it \u2013 the \u201c<\/span>toxic sludge<\/span><\/a>\u201d of misinformation. Ressa is co-founder of the Phillipine\u2019s Rappler, a digital news organization that is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network. Indeed, <\/span>my research<\/span><\/a> has found that fact-checking may be understood as a democracy-building tool that emerges where democratic institutions are perceived to be weak or are under threat. That the Nobel Committee would bestow this prize upon those fighting misinformation shows that the importance of addressing the global infodemic continued in 2021 and will likely be a force for communication researchers to reckon with in the new year.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As 2021 draws to a close, I asked some of our CRC Fellows to reflect on the last 12 months and share what was most noteworthy to them in the realm of communication research. Two of our Fellows observed an increased emphasis on communication efforts for social change. For Assistant Professor of Public Relations Rosalynn […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10,72],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/crc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4234"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/crc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/crc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/crc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20071"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/crc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4234"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/crc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4236,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/crc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4234\/revisions\/4236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/crc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/crc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/crc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}