Faculty Awards & Achievements

W. Lance Bennett had a MacArthur Foundation grant renewed to Aug 2009. The "Civic Learning Online Project" studies the kinds of civic skills young citizens may acquire from online engagement sites such as RockThe Vote and MyBarackObama. The qualities of online learning opportunities are compared with more formal civic education offered in schools. This project has employed five Communication research assistants, along with a number of undergraduates. It links to a parallel project funded by Surdna running through June 2009. The Surdna grant is for developing digital media civic skills training online, and supports the Becoming Citizens undergraduate internship program run by the Center for Communication & Civic Engagement.

David Domke and former B.A. and M.A. student Kevin Coe received the Top Article of the Year Award from the Political Communication Division at the NCA conference. The award is for their article in Journal of Communication, "Petitioners or Prophets? Presidential Discourse, God, and the Ascendancy of Religious Conservatives," which formed a foundation for their 2008 book, The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America (Oxford University Press). Coe is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Arizona.

Kirsten Foot’s book Web Campaigning (with Steve Schneider) (MIT Press, 2006) was awarded the 2008 Doris Graber Outstanding Book Award by the Political Communication Section of the American Political Science Association. The 2008 Doris Graber Outstanding Book Award honors the best book published on political communication in the last 10 years.

John Gastil received an NSF grant to study an ongoing Citizens Parliament deliberative process in Australia. The study will provide short-term educational benefits to the post-graduate, graduate, and undergraduate students involved in this research project. The study’s greatest social impact, however, is the insight it will lend to those hoping to design deliberative and effective hybrid decision-making processes for large scale organizations and political units. Whether the results of this research validate or call into question the particular design developed in Australia, its findings will aid the development of face-to-face and online technology that yields collective choices in ways that simultaneously maintain process integrity and generate decision legitimacy.

Christine Harold received a Royalty Research Fund award in 2008.  The award will support research on the remaining case studies of Christine's second book, De/signing Rhetoric: Mass Consumption and Environmental Sustainability in the '"Age of Aesthetics."  The book looks at the relationship between industrial design, mass consumption, and environmental sustainability through a series of case studies about different ways people consume material goods.  The first, a study of Target and IKEA's claims to "democratize design" is in a recent edition of the journal Public Culture.  The remaining cases will look at the recycled culture and eco-design movements and their historical antecedents.

Ralina Joseph received a 2009 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty. The fellowship is operated by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation at Princeton University. Joseph is one of 20 scholars chosen nationally this year. The award carries funding support for research, brings recipients to campus for a retreat, and includes substantial mentoring by senior scholars.

Mac Parks was named the 2008 winner of the distinguished Miller Book Award for the Interpersonal Communication Division of the National Communication Association for his 2007 book, Personal Relationships and Personal Networks.  The Miller Award honors the best book written in interpersonal communication within a five-year period.

Roger Simpson received the 2008 International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies Frank Ochberg Award for Media and Trauma Study. This award was established in 2003 to recognize significant contributions by clinicians and researchers on the relationship of media and trauma. Simpson is the sixth recipient of this highly prestigious award.

Doug Underwood's new book, Journalism and the Novel: Truth and Fiction, 1700-2000 was recently released by Cambridge University Press.