Department News and Notes
Dr. Patrick Murphy will step down as chairman of the Mass Communications Department at the end of Spring 2009.
Dr. Gary Hicks will become the new chairman of the department and Dr. Elza Ibroscheva will become the new graduate program director, Hicks’ former departmental position.
Dr. Elza Ibroscheva has won a grant to participate in the 2009 Regional Symposium Grants "Prospects and Challenges for the First Post-Communist
Generation: Young People Today in Eurasia and Eastern Europe." The symposium will be hosted by IREX, in collaboration with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars’ Kennan Institute and the East European Studies Program. The symposium will result in recommendations for the development of U.S. foreign policy in the region.
In 2008, Ibroscheva also presented her research at the International Communication Association conference in Montreal, Canada, and at the International Association for Communication and Media Research conference in Stockholm, Sweden. Her findings were published in the Journal of Intercultural Communication, the Russian Journal of Communication and Politics and Culture.
She is working on a book chapter on the portrayals of women in advertising in Bulgaria, slated for publication by the end of 2009.
Drs.' Ralph Donald and Riley Maynard's second edition of Allyn and Bacon
Longman Publishers textbook, "Fundamentals of Television Production" is now
in use at SIUE in TV production courses, as well as many other colleges and
universities around the country.
Dr. Donald also presented a paper, “Feminine Roles in American War Films,”
at the November 2008 Conference of the Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.
Dr. Maynard also presented at the Conference of the Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association. He presented his paper "Does the Rise of Bloggers Mean the Death of Journalism?"
Dr. Musonda Kapatamoyo has written a chapter that appears in a book entitled "The Challenge of Change in Africa's Higher Education in the 21st Century." Kapatamoyo’s chapter is entitled "Information and Communication Technologies in Zambia: Addressing Gaps Between Expectations and Realizations in Higher Education Pedagogy."
Excerpts are at here at Cambria Press.
In February, Kapatamoyo presented "Diasporic Fusion: Africa Cup of Nations and Internet Live Viewing as Shared Space.” In the presentation at the Communication, Media and Sport in Africa Conference at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, he explored the role of the Internet in bringing people in diaspora closer to their home nations by looking at several characteristics like the Internet’s ubiquity, speed, interactivity, ability to shrink geography, elimination of time barriers, etc.
See Kapatamoyo discuss the topic here.
In January, he presented “A Biographical Study of Mobile Telephones in Africa: Zambia as a Case Study” at the 4th International Conference on Technology, Knowledge and Society at Northeastern University, Boston, Mass.
Instructor Tom Atwood posed a serious question in his latest documentary: Is documentary filmmaking exploitive by nature?
He explores the possible answers in “Trafficking in Reality,” a 51-minute film that examines the issues of consent and exploitation.
The documentary was created as a project within the Department of Mass Communications at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. It was screened there for the first time on Aug. 20, 2008. Besides being a full-time instructor at SIUE, Atwood is also a freelance producer. His documentaries have received a Peabody Award, as well as numerous Emmy nominations and awards.
For more information, and to see excerpts from previous documentaries, visit www.tomatwood.net