Patrick D. Murphy is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director, Department of Mass Communications at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, where he has taught transnational media, media critical theory, mass communication theory, and documentary media since 1994.

His research program is based in media cultural studies with a focus on media’s role in the formation of global culture. This focus attempts to bridge the gap between globalization theory (e.g. the political economy of international communication) and ethnographic inquiry (the study of audiences consuming media in specific cultural-historical contexts) to address the symbolic and ideological dimensions of transnational consumer culture and their connection to cultural practice and common sense.

Much of his scholarship has concentrated on media and culture in Latin America. Through a Fulbright-García Robles fellowship (1993-1994) he initiated a series of ethnographic studies of television and cultural transformation in central Mexico— a project he is still continuing. He has published on the topics of media reception and cultural change, ethnographic method, the political economy of transnational media, and Latin American communication theory.

His work has appeared in Cultural Studies, Howard Journal of Communication, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journal of International Communication, and Qualitative Inquiry, as well chapters in several books. Most recently his chapter “Without Ideology?: Rethinking hegemony in the age of transnational media,” appears in L. Artz & Y. Kamalipour, (Eds.), The Globalization of Corporate Media Hegemony. (SUNY Press). Currently he is editing (with Marwan Kraidy, American University) a collection of global media ethnographies entitled Media Ethnography and Transnational Audiences.