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Spring 2009 Newsletter (PDF)

Student Spotlght: Satomi Kamimura

Communication major and Journalism minor Satomi Kamimura recently had her paper “Turn-Taking in Japanese and Anglo-American English Conversation:  A Comparative Study in Interaction“ accepted at The Conference for Undergraduate Research in Communication.  The conference, which took place this year on April 18th in Rochester, NY, began in 2004 as a small gathering of communication students from western New York.  It has since grown into a vibrant regional conference.  Sponsored by the Department of Communication and held annually at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), the conference draws nearly 200 undergraduate scholars from colleges and universities in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Virginia.
  
Satomi’s paper was also accepted at the UAlbany Undergraduate Research Conference, which was held on campus on April 18th and 19th.  This conference gives UAlbany undergraduate students an opportunity to share their research with their peers, faculty, and the community. 

Satomi is a senior at UAlbany, originally from Himeji, Japan, and will be graduating this August.

Communication Majors Receive University-Wide Recognition

On Sunday, March 15th several undergraduate Communication majors were honored by receiving The President’s Award for Leadership.  This award is designed to recognize and reward students who have made significant contributions to enhance the quality of life at the University at Albany.  To receive the award, recipients must have demonstrated a variety of accomplishments including extraordinary leadership, service, involvement within the University community, and strong academic performance. 

Congratulations to all of our 2009 recipients on this prestigious award!

Athletes Leadership Award
Jennifer Gurrant
Batavia, NY
Senior Communication Major
Most Valuable Player (Indoor & Outdoor Track)
Division I Academic All-American Team, Track

Great Dane Award
Paul Porter III
East Aurora, NY
Senior Communication Major
Orientation Assistant, Orientation Office
Vice President, Middle Earth Peer Assistance Program

Outstanding Senior Award
Jamie Tedesco
Airmont, NY
Senior Business Administration, Communication Major
Co-President, Glamour Gals Chapter
Treasurer, Presidential Honors Society

Outstanding Student Organization
Great Dane Award
The Driving Force
Laura Anderson-Gavin, President
Dawn Kassirer, Treasurer
Shannon Weil, Vice President
Krista Klock, Secretary

Athletes Leadership Award
Rory Redman
Baldwin, NY
Senior Communication Major
UAlbany Women’s Lacrosse
National Society of Collegiate Scholars

Middle Earth Award
Alyson Walter
Getzville, NY
Senior Communication Major
Secretary, Middle Earth Peer Assistance Program
Planning Committee Member, Alcohol Awareness Week

Five Quad Award
Cali Zimmerman
Spencerport, NY
Senior Communication Major
Crew Chief/Lieutenant/Driver, Five Quad Volunteer Ambulance Service

Lambda Pi Eta Inductees

Lambda Pi Eta, the official communication studies honor society of the National Communication Association (NCA), held its Nu Alpha Chapter (University at Albany) induction ceremony on the evening of April 1st.  

This year fifty-five students from UAlbany were inducted into the society.  To be eligible for membership in this nationally recognized honor society, students must demonstrate a commitment to the study and practice of communication, combined with strong academic achievement.  The society promotes interest in the field of communication, recognizes and fosters scholastic achievement in communication studies, and encourages professional development among communication majors.  The Nu Alpha Chapter of Lambda Pi Eta congratulates and welcomes its 2008-2009 inductees!  

For more information on Lambda Pi Eta, please visit our website:
 
               http://www.albany.edu/communication/ug-lpe.htm

Department News

Faculty Grants

Jennifer Stromer-Galley received a FRAP (Faculty Research Awards Program) grant to hire a research assistant to help her with a forthcoming book titled  “Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age”. The book provides a history of presidential campaign tactics using information and communication technologies (ICTs) for the last four election cycles, and examines how presidential campaigning has changed as candidates have adopted ICTs.  

Professors Annis Golden and Anita Pomerantz also received a FRAP award from the College of Arts and Science to support a research project titled “Communication Among Healthcare Providers and Families of Individuals with Traumatic Brain Injuries in a Rehabilitation Setting.” The study will take place at the Northeast Center for Special Care, and will combine analysis of conversations between staff and families with analysis of follow-up interviews. The project’s goal is to arrive at a better understanding of the range of problems that staff and families encounter in their interactions, and to identify interactional resources that might be useful in resolving them.

The University at Albany Faculty Research Awards Program (FRAP) is a competitive award that provides seed funding to support faculty research and other creative endeavors.

Professor Annis Golden Receives Promotion

Professor Annis Golden was recently promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure.  Dr. Golden’s research areas focus primarily on organizational and health communication, specifically how individuals manage their relationships to organizations, and the role of communication in managing work and personal-life interrelationships.

Congratulations to Professor Golden on this wonderful achievement!


New Health Communication Concentration for MA Program 

The Department of Communication has recently received approval for a new concentration area in the MA program.  Health communication joins political, organizational, and interpersonal/intercultural communication as areas of study for Master’s students.  This new concentration area will focus on ways that health communication shapes, and is shaped by, people’s health and institutional aspects of health care.

   
New PhD Program Receives Final Approval

We are also pleased to announce the Communication Doctoral Program has been fully approved!  The program emphasizes communication theory, research methods, and the application of knowledge in the field to identify, analyze, and propose solutions for communication problems. 
   
For more information about the MA or PhD program, please contact our Director of Graduate Studies, Dr. Tim Stephen, at: stephen@albany.edu or visit the Graduate Studies website at: http://www.albany.edu/graduate/

Research Paper Awards for Doctoral Students
   
Sean Rintel’s paper entitled “Coping with Personal Desktop Videoconferencing Bandwidth Problems: Reactions, Resolution Outcome and Continuity Outcomes” has won a Top Four Student Paper Award in the Human Communication and Technology Division of NCA.  Sean will present his paper in Chicago at the NCA conference in November.
   

Paul Denvir recently had his paper, "Patients' Enactment of Normative Stances Toward Reported Substance Use Conduct: Managing Identity During Routine History Taking" earn the top paper award in the Language and Social Interaction Division of the International Communication Association. Paul presented his paper at the 2009 ICA convention in May.

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Fall 2008 Newsletter (PDF)

Debate Watch

During the presidential campaign this fall, several debate watches were held here on campus giving students an opportunity to view the debates with peers and discuss their impressions afterwards.  The debate watches were hosted by the Department of Political Science and the Department of Communication, along with the College Democrats, the College Republicans, and the Office of Student Involvement and Leadership.

Professors Kelli Lammie, Mihye Seo, and Jennifer Stromer-Galley are interested in young adults’ reactions to various kinds of political communication during the 2008 presidential election, and conducted a study with students during the debate watches.  The purpose of the study was to get people together to talk about the election and what they've seen during the debates before the media and the campaigns had a chance to react.  Their study tries to assess quantitatively how students feel about the debate and the discussions they’ve had with other students.  Our professors are specifically interested in whether or not students learn from the debates and if there are other effects as well— do they make students cynical, or more likely to get involved?  Our faculty also hope that the discussions lead to more knowledge and interest among the students.  The team is still in the process of collecting data, but expects to have results as early as this spring.

Student Spotlight: The Driving Force

When Laura Anderson-Gavin decided to go back to school and enroll as a non-traditional commuter student at UAlbany, she expected to feel different than the rest of the students and assumed she wouldn’t make many friends.  That changed when she became a BA/MA communication major and enrolled in Professor B.J. Fehr’s COM 203 speech class.  “It was a small class, and I really got to know the other students.  We were able to learn about each other and share experiences through assignments.”  One thing she discovered was there were several commuters in the class, many of whom said they didn’t know anyone on campus either and did not regularly attend on-campus events. 
   
After meeting with various departments on campus and sharing her concerns, Anderson-Gavin proposed the idea of a commuter lounge on campus, an idea she also shared with her speech class.  After class many of her fellow students expressed interest in helping to form a group for commuter students, and The Driving Force was born.  The mission of The Driving Force is to provide commuting and non—traditional students (25 years old and up) with campus-related social opportunities, to advocate to meet their needs, to support and inform the administration regarding activities designed to serve this population, and to provide information and resources to create a successful and meaningful college experience.  The new commuter lounge on campus, located in the Patroon Lounge, opened in Fall 2008.
   
“The support that we have received from the administration, faculty, and staff has been tremendous.  I hope that other commuter and non-traditional students will join The Driving Force, come to our meetings and share their ideas about how to become connected, and in the process discover that there is a big community waiting to welcome them.”
   
For more information on The Driving Force, please email: drvforce@albany.edu

Current Events

Scholary Communication

Professor Tim Stephen traveled to Lansing, Michigan to deliver an invited presentation of his research on scholarly communication at Michigan State University's School of Communication on October 17.  His research addresses the publication  process in the communication field, considering such topics as historical trends and norms, measuring faculty performance, and severe problems for the field that have resulted from the takeover of the academic publishing industry by for-profit publishers. 
   
Professor Stephen described new procedures for tracking the research productivity of the field's leading universities and demonstrated web-based systems for assessing productivity that he has authored and made available online.

Doctor-Patient Interaction

Professor Anita Pomerantz' research on doctor-patient interaction has attracted the interest of scholars in several disciplines.  In October 2008 she presented her research on negotiating roles during the medical consultation in the Sociology Department at Boston University.  In July 2009 she will give a plenary lecture at the Penn State Summer Institute in Applied Linguistics, addressing how patients actualize their agendas during a medical visit .  Also in July 2009, she will be a plenary speaker on the topic of practices for achieving patient literacy at the International Meeting on Conversation Analysis and Clinical Encounters in Exeter, England.

Brazilian Communication Students Visit UAlbany

A group of Brazilian communication and journalism students and professors from the McKenzie Presbyterian University in São Paulo visited campus the week of Oct. 13th.  During their visit, the group toured campus and visited WAMC Northeast Public Radio and WNYT New Channel 13 studios, and The Times Union Building with UAlbany Professors Thomas Bass and Nancy Roberts.  The students also attended classes, including COM 203Y: Speech Composition and Presentation, a course taught by Virginia Yonkers. 
   
As part of the visit, COM 203Y students gave the visiting students an in-class presentation on the journalism and communication majors here at UAlbany.  After the presentation, the two groups of students had an opportunity to interact, ask questions, and discuss the presentation.
  
The purpose of the campus visit was to explore the possibility of establishing a foreign exchange program between the two schools.
   
Since the Brazilian university was founded in 1870 by John Theron Mackenzie, a New York state lawyer, it has graduated over 300,000 students.  Among those alumni are numerous important names in Brazilian history, as well as important personalities of Brazilian politics and civil society.

Award Winning Paper for the Communication Department and the CTG

The American Society for Information Science and Technology recently awarded to authors from the Department of Communication and UAlbany’s Center for Technology and Government the John Wiley & Sons Best JASIST (Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology) Paper Award.
   
The paper, entitled Geographic Information Technologies, Structuration Theory, and the World Trade Center Crisis, was a collaboration between Teresa M. Harrison, chair of the Communication Department, and CTG’s Theresa Pardo, deputy director, J. Ramon Gil-Garcia, research fellow, Fiona Thompson, and Dubravka Juraga. 
   
This award recognizes the best refereed paper published in the volume year of JASIST preceding the ASIS&T annual meeting.  The paper was based on interview data from a CTG research project that explored how government used information technology in the response to the World Trade Center crisis.  In the article, the authors argued that awareness and appreciation of the potential value of GIT (geographic information technologies) changed dramatically as a result of the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001. 
   
ASIS&T considers a number of criteria when selecting a paper for this award, including professional merit, creativity and originality, scientific and professional quality of the research, and the scholarship embodied in the presentation.  The committee also looked at the paper’s contribution in terms of societal or scientific/technical significance of the topic, usefulness of the paper to practicing professionals, and the paper’s relevance to the interests of information science and technology, in addition to the overall quality of the paper.

Spring 2008 Newsletter (PDF)

New PhD Program Update

The new PhD program continues to move forward! Since the last update, the program has been approved by the Graduate Studies Committee, the University Senate, and is currently at SUNY Central awaiting final approval.

The new proposal underwent an external review last summer, which received overwhelmingly positive responses from some of the leading experts in the field of communication. The external review featured Dr. Gerry Philipsen, Professor of Communication at the University of Washington, Dr. Donald J. Cegala, Professor of Communication and Family Medicine at The Ohio State University, and Dr. Robert T. Craig, Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Philipsen's areas of expertise include ethnography of communication, small group discussion and decision making, and orality. Dr. Cegala specializes in the areas of persuasion at the undergraduate level, health communication at the graduate level, and also teaches courses in discourse and interaction analysis and interpersonal communication in health contexts. Dr. Craig specializes in communication theory and philosophy, discourse analysis, and argumentation.

Faculty News

Dr. Alan Belasen, Lecturer, published his book: The Theory and Practice of Corporate Communication: A Competing Values Perspective (2008, SAGE Publications).
Using case studies and practical applications (from such companies and organizations as Starbucks, NASA, the American Red Cross, Johnson & Johnson, FedEx, Oracle, GM, Microsoft, IBM, Verizon, and Target, among others), the book promotes the teaching of corporate communication from a strategic viewpoint. The organizing schema introduced in this book is the Competing Values Framework for Corporate Communication (CVFCC). The framework brings the whole (corporate communication) and parts (marketing communication, financial communication, organizational communication, management communication) into a more sophisticated theoretical treatment of corporate communication that goes beyond merely discussing "best practices".
An extensive Instructor's Manual CD-ROM, which was developed and written by Professor Belasen, with learning units, case applications, analyses, links to Internet resources, and PowerPoint slides for each of the book's 15 chapters is also available.

Share the Beat of Life

Through a partnership with the Center for Organ and Tissue Donation, this spring the Department of Communication offered COM 465: Communication Campaign Practicum. This special course is designed to give communication undergraduates a "real world" experience developing and implementing an effective public relations campaign. Students are taught to think strategically about public relations as it relates to this campaign and others, and then work in teams to conceptualize, design, and execute the campaign.
The course was taught by Lissa D'Aquanni, lecturer and principal of Out on a Limb Consulting. It focuses on educating the students' peers about the life saving benefits or organ and tissue donation and encouraging them to sign the registry. The Center for Donation and Transplant serves as the client and provides volunteer speakers to help educate the students and their peers.
The class goal was to add 700 University at Albany students to the New York State "Donate Life" Registry and to educate 2,000 of their peers. By the end of the campaign, 835 new donors were added to the registry and over 5,000 students were educated on organ and tissue donation!
The students designed a slate of special events, which included coupling their efforts with the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life Kickoff, A Cappella Fest held by Middle Earth, and the Circle K Basketball Tournament. They also organized a PS2 Guitar Hero Tournament, and the Share the Beat of Life concert. Fantastic prizes including t-shirts, restaurant gift certificates, OTD bracelets, and movie passes were given away during these events. Everyone who registered to become a new donor was also entered in a raffle to win a brand new Nintendo Wii!

To find out more about the class and organ and tissue donation, visit:

www.albany.edu/otd

Graduate Student Research

Novices Developing Familiarity with Desktop Videoconferencing

Doctoral Student E. Sean Rintel is investigating how novices develop familiarity with desktop videoconferencing. He recruited twelve pairs of people in long-distance relationships--mostly couples, some family, some friends--to use desktop videoconferencing to talk to one another from their own homes for two months. Each pair could talk whenever they wanted about whatever they wanted during the trial period, and those conferences were recorded. Each pair was also interviewed before, during and after their trial. The goal is to determine what challenges the pairs face in coming to grips with the technology as they simultaneously try to maintain their relationships. One of the early findings is that getting underway, which involves moving from logging on to the first substantive topic, was often complicated by attempts to ensure that each party could be seen and heard at an acceptable level of quality. Pairs had to learn how to describe the problems they were having seeing and hearing one another, and how to solve those problems. This project was made possible in part by the donation of Session videoconferencing software and hosting services by Wave3 Inc.

Faceless Words: The Effect of Message Disembodiment on Deliberator Elaboration and Individuation

Master's Student Michael Mussman's research experiment explores whether deliberator anonymity affects the amount of topically-relevant elaboration, which is often said to be a sign of rationality, found in the messages of a computer-mediated deliberation. The experiment compares the messages created by a group of deliberators identified by their names and photos with the messages from a group of anonymous deliberators. He hypothesizes that messages created by anonymous deliberators will contain fewer instances of "individuation", or language which relates the deliberation's topic in terms of the deliberator's persona or the personas of other people. He further hypothesizes that messages with less individuation will have more statements of elaboration which expand upon the topic. After a lengthy review by the Institutional Review Board, Mike is currently recruiting participants for the study from the undergraduate classes of Professors Halkowski, Seo, and Martin. Data analysis is underway and anticipated to be completed soon. Mike will be graduating in August and beginning doctoral work in the fall at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, studying public policy.


The Spouses of Presidential Candidates: The Media's Coverage of the Unofficial Running Mates

Lauren Bryant, Master's Student in Communication, analyzed 175 newspaper articles to determine how the spouses of the Democratic presidential candidates were portrayed in the news media during the 2008 primary season, and if the news media relied upon traditional gender role expectations in their coverage. This study suggests that the New York Times and the Washington Post did not engage in gender bias in their coverage of Elizabeth Edwards, Michelle Obama, and Bill Clinton. The analysis indicates that instead of depicting the spouses in traditional gender roles and relying upon traditional gender role expectations which is consistent with previous literature on first ladies and political spouses, the New York Times and the Washington Post relied upon the expectations of spouses of presidential candidates in their depiction of these individuals.

Doctoral Student Marina Marcou-O'Malley's research concentrates on presidential campaign discourse. She is currently working on campaign discourse "missteps" which pose problems for maintaining control of the message for which campaigns strive. Her research is at a very early stage, which allows her to monitor the current presidential race and collect examples of situations where campaigns have lost control of the discourse. A "misstep" is defined as an instance during the campaign when the candidate or a surrogate has said something the mass media treats as a problematic statement and devotes lots of attention to its scrutiny.

New PhD Program in Works

The Communication Department is pleased to announce substantial progress in the development of a proposed new program leading to the Doctor of Philosophy degree in communication. The new program is designed to prepare students to teach in college and university contexts and for careers in communication research. In late June 2007 an external review team, comprised of noted scholars from the discipline, came to campus to view the program which will emphasize communication theory, research methods, and the application of knowledge in the field to identify, analyze, and propose solutions for communication problems. Projected to begin in fall 2008, the program requires at least three academic years of full-time study and research, or the equivalent over a longer period, beyond the baccalaureate. We expect to make further announcements about the progress of this program in future editions of this newsletter. For more information on the new program in the meantime, please contact Prof. Anita Pomeranz, Director of Graduate Studies at apom@albany.edu or Prof. Teresa Harrison at harrison@albany.edu.

Dr. Robert Sanders Retires

Dr. Robert Sanders, Professor of Communication at UAlbany, has retired after thirty-four years with the Department. Professor Sanders led the Department as an internationally known scholar, mentor, and instructor, in addition to serving twelve years as Chair of the Department. He has been an innovative researcher in the discipline of communication, with a special concentration on social influence.

Professor Sanders has made a significant impact on many of his colleagues. Anita Pomerantz, Professor in the Department of Communication, reported "Bob Sanders has been an extremely important colleague and friend to me. He freely shared many insights about teaching, scholarship, and the nature of the discipline. He has been a superb colleague from the day he recruited me in 1999 through the present, and I expect to continue collaborative scholarship with him after his retirement. I am grateful for the many contributions he has made to the life of the Department."

Senem Guney, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, adds that Prof. Sanders' attentiveness to the intellectual growth and professional development of junior faculty members has been exceptional. Dr. Guney said, "The engaged mentorship that Prof. Sanders has generously given to his younger colleagues like myself goes beyond what some people receive in their graduate school training."

In addition to his overall interest in social influence, his other research areas include studies of the development of strategic communication in children, the influence of context on the interpretation of discourse, and strategies used to avoid overt conflict. Professor Sanders edited the journal, Research on Language and Social Interaction, from 1988-1998, and was Chair of the Language and Social Interaction Divisions of both the national Communication Association and the International Communication Association. In 2005, he co-edited the Handbook of Language and Social Interaction.

New Faculty Members Join Communication Department

• Kelli Lammie, Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania

Kelli Lammie is an Assistant Professor who received her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, her interest in political communication has deep roots.

Her principle area of focus, as well as recent research, has been at the intersection of popular culture and political communication. She is extremely interested in the role popular culture plays in helping citizens make sense of today's political climate. Prof. Lammie's dissertation, entitled "The (Not-So) 'Powerless Elite:' Celebrity Endorsements of Political Candidates" advanced a framework to explain the influence of celebrities in electoral campaigns.

Her other research interests include persuasion theory, the use of entertainment programming and comedy in shaping political attitudes, and the influence of a variety of media on political knowledge, interest, and participation.

In Fall 2007, Dr. Lammie will be teaching COM 378: American Mass Media and Politics and COM 520: Theories and Research in Political Communication.

• Mihye Seo, Ohio State University

Mihye Seo is an Assistant Professor who received her Ph.D. from the School of Communication at The Ohio State University. Originally from Korea, Prof. Seo initially started studying communication to pursue a career in journalism. Along the way she became fascinated by studying how the effects of media intertwine with everyday life, and decided to change her focus purely to communication.

Her research focuses on the interface of mass media effects and emerging technologies, and attempts to understand the effects of mass media in the realm of politics. She is particularly interested in the differential influence of various mass media (including the Internet) on producing informed and participatory citizens. She is also interested in the role of mass media in shaping social reality and its consequences in the process of political decision-making. Prof. Seo is currently working on a study with the Mind Lab called media causation, which examines how individuals attribute social issues to the mass media.

Prof. Seo's fall courses will include COM 503: Message Design and Social Influence, and COM 625: Mass Media Effects in Political Communication.

Graduation Ceremony - May 19, 2007

The Department of Communication's spring recognition ceremony was held on Saturday, May 19th, in the SEFCU Arena. Despite wet and unseasonably cool weather, the even saw a great turnout! The Department awarded diplomas to 210 undergraduates this spring, with 14 graduate students receiving Master's Degrees.

This year's ceremony featured guest speaker Ms. Susan Arbetter. Susan has had a long and illustrious career in the field of communication, and currently works as a host and producer at WMHT Public Television. Mr. Benjamin Kallos, Esq. (BA '02) also spoke at this year's ceremony and was our first ever alumni speaker. Ben went on to receive his J.D. from UBuffalo and now practices law with Abrams, Fensterman, Fensterman, Eisman, Greenberg, Formato & Einiger, LLP in Lake Success, NY.

Special recognition also went to Denise Kerwath, who was the winner of the department's annual Richard W. Wilkie Award for the Outstanding Undergraduate Student in Communication. The award is given annually at the end of the spring semester to a graduating communication student who has achieved academic excellence, especially in argumentation and public discourse. Congratulations to Denise and all of our graduates this year! And special thanks to Susan and Ben!