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Media War & Conflict-Resolution Conference
at BGSU
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Research
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Message from the Director
From well over 50 key research concepts that I identified in the period leading to my appointment at BGSU (drawing from the many available statements of faculty research publications and interest), three principal clusters emerged. The first cluster, that I originally labelled "cyberspace," brings together research interests to do with the computer mediated communication, internet, online journalism, issues of online copyright, law, user contracts and business models, interactive media, information society, information technology, cyber imperialism, cyber-ethnography, cyberspace and culture. We have subsequently described this area as the "emerging communication technologies" research cluster.
The second category brings together development communication, foreign correspondence, international news; international media and media flows, including international advertising, market research and public relations; communication issues in specific geographical areas (e.g. Caribbean, Chad, China, Eastern Europe, Middle East, Morocco, Russia, Tunisia etc.), newsworthiness, post-colonial studies; issues of culture and identity, including feminism and gender; discourse, specific media genres (e.g. rap). From this has developed the "international media" research cluster.
A third, more eclectic area - crisis, social problem or "applied" communications - envelops health communication, eating disorders, pedagogy, parenting, children, organization communication, prisons, women's issues, minorities. Perhaps included within this category or, alternatively, needing a separate, fourth, category ("media industry?"), are such topics as political economy, sales, public opinion, news professionalism; media management, roles and occupations; media history; media diversity, concentration, convergence, and ownership; intellectual property, media law, national security and surveillance issues, telecommunications policy, media representations; uses and gratifications or reception analysis. Some areas of research seem resistant to any attempt on my part to pigeon-hole them into either a three or a four-part scheme, including research methods, rhetoric and persuasion, performance and production. The School has subsequently identified seven faculty members who are active researchers in the important area of health communication and this, then, has become the third of the School's research clusters.
Oliver Boyd-Barrett
Please click here for more information about the three research clusters.
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