ANNOUNCEMENTS
Maps
and Directions to the Department of Communication
Department
News
UCSD Calendar of Events
Please mark your calendars for Jenifer R. Vernon's dissertation defense.
Date; August 28, 2008
Time: 1:00
Location: Media and Communication Center 201
Title: Making Community with the Deep Communication of Popular Live Poetry at the Millennium
Summary: By way of ethnography, Ms. Vernon's dissertation reveals the meaning of the deep communication of popular live poetry and the public ritual of its event. This genre of poetry is carried out through face-to-face communication between poets, audiences and hosts during free, publicly oriented events at venues such as coffeehouses. The form of poetry around which participants gather is rooted in the verbal art of oral, spoken poetry, draws inspiration from popular published poets such as Emily Dickinson, musicians such as Miles Davis and rap artists, and performative practices from hip hop culture, slam poetry and storytelling.
Popular live poetry reflects a working class ethos: in its form, its collective organization of poets in poetry crews, the bottom-up organization of its open-mics and slam events and the culture that comes to the fore through its activity. Yet, as a popular forum, it includes both working class and middle class participants. The communicative production of the form of live poetry draws poets and audiences together in ephemeral moments of complex, affective, intersubjective community. These moments are instructive: in combination with the public ritual of the event that safeguards against hierarchical inequalities across participants, they guide the diverse, cross-class participants in the imagination of new constellations of community and the rehearsal of an urban polis yet to be.
Ms. Vernon's findings are based on research conducted from 2000 to 2004 and again from 2006 to 2007, in San Diego, CA, and to a lesser degree in Tijuana, MX and Austin, TX. She uses methods of participant observation as an audience member and poet, ethnographic videography, and open-ended interviews with poets, audience members, event hosts and venue proprietors. Ms. Vernon video-interviewed eight hosts of primary poetry events, forty poets, thirty audience members and video-recorded thirty-five acts of live poetry. She focuses on the most popular event in the San Diego/Tijuana region during the first half of the decade of 2000 to ground her inquiry into the cultural and political meaning of popular live poetry at the millennium.
Yael Warshel's defended her disertation on August 4th, 2008
Title: How do you Teach Children that Terrorists, Armies and the Police Can Live Together Peacefully?: A Peace Communication Assessment Model
Summary: Yael's dissertation, entitled, How do you Teach Children that Terrorists, Armies and the Police Can Live Together Peacefully?: A Peace Communication Assessment Model, is divided into two parts. In the first part, she describes the historically applied global uses of communication in an effort to intervene into political conflict. She classifies these practices into seven models whose abilities to manage conflict she critically reviews, and recommends become the subject of scholarly inquiry as part of a new communication subfield she terms “peace communication.”
In the second part, she assesses a peace communication intervention case, based on the mediated contact effects model, and discusses the interpretation made of it by the population, at whom it was targeted. The case she assessed is Israeli and Palestinian Sesame Street television programs – co-produced by teams of Palestinian, Israeli, Jordanian and American producers. The Israeli and Palestinian television programs targeted children who, per the axes of their national and civic identities, are Jewish-Israeli, Palestinian and Arab/Palestinian-Israeli. Each of these groups interpret the Israeli-Palestinian ethnopolitical conflict, framed by the Arab-Israeli interstate conflict, through the respective categorical framework of statebearing nation, stateless nation and state minority. In her audience reception analysis, she demonstrates how these respective categories formed the schema through which the audience filtered their interpretations of the efforts of the Sesame Street programs. While the children accepted and negotiated aspects of the text of these television programs, they resisted it to the extent that, in many cases, they did not “see” each other in the programs.
Her findings (from two and a half years of fieldwork) are rooted in a combination of comparative, multi-cited ethnographic, conflict zone fieldwork, audience reception studies and child-specific methodologies, and based on mixed qualitative and quantitative methods. They shed light on the “normalcy” of life within zones of conflict and, in turn, help to explain why the conflict contexts of these children’s lives led them to oppositionally decode the encoded mediated contact text of the programs. In light of their active decodings, the television programs were unable to effectively mediate conflict in many instances. She concludes by recommending that mediated contact interventions encode conflict narratives into their designs in an effort to better work towards both building and making peace.
Jericho Burg completed her Ph.D. on July 2, 2008.
Her dissertation, titled "Fixing Famine: The Politics of Information in Famine Early Warning." combines ethnographic, interview, and documentary data gathered in Ethiopia to analyze famine early warning systems – large-scale information systems combining climate, food production, market, and public health data, which have become a major focus in international famine prevention efforts since the 1970s. Famine early warning is part of a top-down international response that even many early warning experts themselves feel has been unable to solve the problems leading to famine. In Ethiopia, several different international, governmental, and nongovernmental organizations with different agendas have developed their own early warning systems. The information upon which humanitarian agencies act is a product of this complex political environment, as well as particular understandings of famine that become fixed in the systems through the choice of indicators and analytic methods. Though the goal of early warning is to save lives by providing timely and accurate information, early warning experts have come to value objectivity, consensus, and transparency over accuracy because of constraints and pressures in their organizational environment. This, combined with donor governments’ need for information they feel is credible, privileges certain kinds of expertise (that of early warning experts) over others (e.g. that of famine-affected people). Therefore, those officially responding to famine see those with the most direct experience of famine as lacking relevant knowledge and thus only capable of participating as passive aid recipients. The needs of famine-affected people can be better addressed by taking their experiences of and responses to famine into account and transforming the endeavors of famine early warning and response accordingly.
J.R. Osborn defended his Dissertation.
TITLE: "The Type of Calligraphy: Writing, Print, and Technologies of the Arabic Alphabet"
RESEARCH SUMMARY: My research pursued the story of Arabic script, as it moves across communication media and languages. It examines multiple applications of Arabic script and explores the importance of print culture and printed material in relation to the rise of the modern bureaucratic state. Arabic typography, calligraphy, and recent artistic experiments all reveal meaning through a shared collection of symbols: the letters and glyphs of the Arabic alphabet. The communicative question asks how distinct practices employ this common set of visual tools. Handwritten, printed, digitally designed, and artistic Arabic letters inscribe different types of texts, and relationships across these diverse texts influence the meaning, understanding, and appreciation of the letter as a visual symbol.
Via a historical study of Arabic script, this dissertation outlines a series of communicative strategies that might usefully inform current practices of textual design. Aesthetic differences modify the communication of written Arabic messages, and awareness of this visual variation invites more engaged readings and more creative modes of writing. As practices of writing continue to shift both in the Middle East and globally, the visual conventions surrounding Arabic script offer an opportunity to reexamine and reimagine contemporary practices. Diverse methods of visual inscription suggest new possibilities of meaning and new avenues of critique.