Summer/Fall 2018 PhD Student Publications, Presentations, & Awards

Soledad Altrudi (Third Year), Frances Corry (Third Year), MC Forelle (ABD), & Andrea Alarcon (Third Year) presented their joint paper on Sociotechnical Imaginaries at the Critical Mediations conference.

Jeeyun (Sophia) Baik (Third Year)

  • Presented her paper, “When People Speak Out Unpopular Opinions: Network Centrality, Willingness to Self-Censor and Thresholds in Opinion Expression,” at the 11th Political Networks Conference in Arlington, VA.
  • Presented her paper, “Repurposed geo-data and the counterpublic: folk theories of remote check-ins to Standing Rock on Facebook” at the AEJMC (Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication) conference in Washington, D.C

TJ Billard (ABD) compiled TMS: A Bibliography of Transgender Media Studies, which comprises over 250 entries and has been widely circulated among both trans studies and communication scholar networks.

Matthew Bui (ABD) and Rachel Moran (ABD) were presented with the 2018 Charles Benton Junior Scholar Award at TPRC. They also co-wrote a blog post for the Benton Foundation website.

Matthew Bui (ABD)

Franny Corry (Third Year) received a summer fellowship at Harvard University’s Library Innovation Lab, where she is building MemoryCast, an oral history collection that focuses on personal online experiences through web archives.

Corry and Anna Loup (Third Year) received a 2018 ACM History Fellowship for their project "Capture it While You Can: Revisiting SIGCOMM ‘99’s 'Technical History of the Internet'."

Courtney M. Cox (ABD) and Perry B. Johnson (ABD)

  • Presented two papers at the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport Conference in Vancouver: “Mall Grab: Authenticity and Appropriation in Action Sport Branding” and “‘A Melody that Sets You Free’: Venice’s Mythical Sporting Sounds.”
  • Presented their paper, “‘It Sounded Like A Hippie Was Singing It’: The Ambivalence of José Feliciano’s 1968 National Anthem Performance,” at the Critical Mediations conference.

Nathaniel Ming Curran (Second Year)

  • English, gatekeeping, and Mandarin: the future of language learning in South Korea. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1-13.
  • Learned Through Labour: The Discursive Production of English Speakers in South Korea: A case study of Koreans with high spoken proficiency and low test scores. English Today, 1-6.
  • “A Reflection on South Korea’s Broadband Success,” Media, Culture & Society, Crosscurrents section 

Aram Sinnreich (PhD 2007), MC Forelle (ABD), & Patricia Aufderheide (American University), Copyright Givers and Takers: Mutuality, Altruism and Instrumentalism in Open Licensing, Communication Law and Policy

Traci Gillig (ABD)

Olivia Gonzalez (Second Year), Sierra Bray (Second Year), and Natalie Jonckheere (Second Year) presented their paper, "Like a Boss or Just Bossy? Uncovering Older Males’ Negative Attitudes toward Agentic Female Television Characters" at NCA 2018 in Salt Lake City.

Joo-Wha Hong (Second Year)

  • Presented “Bias in Perception of Art Produced by Artificial Intelligence” at HCI International 2018 in Las Vegas.
  • With Yunwen Wang (Second Year) and Paulina Lanz (Second Year), presented “A Quantitative Assessment of Attributional Biases Using Narratives and Attribution Theory: Faulting the Machine” at NCA 2018 in Salt Lake City.
  • Also at NCA, presented “Agenda diversity and uniformity: News repertoires and their effects on the agenda setting process,” with Eric Wiemer, Samuel Wilson, and David Tewksbury.

Hye Min Kim (Third Year), Appleby, P. R., Christensen, J. L., & Professor Lynn Miller (May, 2018). Parental Rejection and Shame: The Mediating Role of Emotional Bonding in Romantic Relationships Among YMSM. Preconference. Inclusivity and Family Communication Research: Advances and Innovations from Across the Discipline, International Communication Association, Prague, The Czech Republic.

Hyun Tae (Calvin) Kim (Fourth Year), book review, Voice + Matter: Communication, Development, and the Cultural Return, International Journal of Communication

Jillian Kwong (Fourth Year) presented research conducted with the USC Center for Body Computing on attitudes towards wearable and player tracking technologies in professional sports at the 12th Annual USC Body Computing Conference in September 2018.

Paulina Lanz (Second Year) presented her paper, “Fifty Years After Tlatelolco: The Spatial Politics of Amnesia,” at the Critical Mediations conference.

Lauren Levitt (ABD)

  • Performed her piece "Bubbles" at The Art of the Act: A Sex Worker Artists Showcase, a benefit for the Sex Workers' Outreach Project Los Angeles, in June 2018.
  • “Sex Workers’ Support Networks: Managing Precarity in the Gig Economy,” Gig Economy: Workers and Media in the Era of Convergence
  • Interviewed by NPR for a story about the racial disparity in sex worker arrests.
  • Participated in the Sociotechnical Systems of Care Workshop and the Computer Supported Cooperative Work Conference in Jersey City, New Jersey in November.
  • With Zooey Zara (Sex Workers' Outreach Project), presented their paper “Meeting People Where They Are: A Harm Reduction Approach to Services for Sex Workers” at USC’s Law and Global Health Trojan Scholar Spotlight: Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights at USC in November 2018.

Yiqi Li (Third Year) presented her paper, Social Issue Framing Categorization and Network Performance, at the International Sunbelt Social Network Conference, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Kate Miltner (ABD)

  • “The Secret of Happy Families? Regulating (Re)Productive Labor with Agile Family Management,” Spheres: Journal of Digital Cultures, Politics of Reproduction issue
  • Quoted in an article in Polygon, “Gaming’s toxic men, explained"
  • “RuPaul’s Drag Race Keyboard: Affect and Resistance through Visual Communication,” Morris, J.W. and Murray, S. (Eds.), Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps (University of Michigan Press)
  • Presented her paper, “Training the ‘New Collar’ Workforce: The Discourse and Practice of Learning to Code in the United States,” at the Association of Internet Researchers Annual Conference in Montreal.
  • Presented her paper, “The Secrets of Happy Families? Regulating (Re)productive Labor with Agile Family Management,” at the European Communication Research and Education Association in Lugano, Switzerland.

Rachel Moran (ABD), book review, Deciding what’s true: The rise of political fact-checking in American journalism, New Media & Society

Arul Chib (PhD 2007) & Hoan Nguyen (First Year), “Essentialist Identities as Resistance to Immobilities: Communicative Mobilities of Vietnamese Foreign Brides in Singapore,” International Journal of Communication

Clare O'Connor (Fourth Year)

  • Presented her paper “‘Only Wanna Sing’? Ambivalence in the Creative Worship Economy of Hillsong Church” at the International Society for Media, Religion and Culture conference in Boulder, Colorado. 
  • Presented her paper, “The Politics of Citation: Invoking the Memphis Sanitation Strike Today,” at the Critical Mediations conference.

Tyler Quick (Second Year) presented his paper, “Tropicalia and the Affect of Revolution,” at the Critical Mediations conference.

Ruqin Ren (ABD) presented her paper, Understanding Collective Expertise: A Communication Network Perspective, at the International Sunbelt Social Network Conference, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Cerianne Robertson (First Year), “The Media Event Build-Up Phase: A Site of Contestation and Counternarratives,” International Journal of Communication

Emily Sidnam-Mauch (ABD), book review, “Counting the costs and projecting the future of numbering technologies,” New Media & Society

Jingyi Sun (Third Year) presented her paper, "China’s Traditional Media Organizations’ Adoption of WeChat Public Platform Citation Network, Exploitation and Exploration," at the International Sunbelt Social Network Conference, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Liyuan (Leah) Wang (ABD)

  • With Brown, A., Read, S. J., Miller, L. C. (May, 2018). Who You are Can Predict What You Choose to Say on a Virtual Date. Sex, Dating, and Beyond: Perceptions and Messages Matter. International Communication Association, Prague, The Czech Republic.
  • With John Christensen (USC Social Psychology PhD 2011), David Jeong (PhD 2017), and Professor Lynn Miller (in press). Virtual prognostication: When virtual alcohol choices predict change in alcohol consumption over 6-months. Computers in Human Behavior. 5-Year Impact Factor: 4.417  

Yu Xu (ABD)

  • With Professor Peter Monge, Professor Janet Fulk, & Associate Professor Dmitri Williams, presented their paper, "Exploring Social Capital Processes in Online Crowdsourcing: Linking Network Structures and Embedded Resources to Behavioral Outcomes," at the International Sunbelt Social Network Conference, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
  • Attended the Organizational Communication and Information Systems Doctoral Consortium and presented his doctoral prospectus, The Evolution of Multidimensional and Multilevel Networks in Online Crowdsourcing, at the annual conference of the Academy of Management.
  • Presented his dissertation project, “The Evolution of Multidimensional and Multilevel Networks in Online Crowdsourcing,” at the annual Organizational Communication Mini-Conference (OCMC) hosted by the Department of Communication at Rutgers University.

Chi Zhang (ABD) was quoted in The New Yorker: “The Rise and Fall of Affirmative Action

Sulafa Zidani (Third Year)