About Us

Editor

Sharon Kleinman is professor of communications at Quinnipiac University. Her research focuses on the social implications of communication technologies and on issues concerning online and place-based communities. She holds a B.A. in English and American literature from Brandeis University and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in communication from Cornell University. She is the editor of Displacing Place: Mobile Communication in the Twenty-first Century (Peter Lang, 2007) and The Culture of Efficiency: Technology in Everyday Life (Peter Lang, 2009). She is currently working on a solo-authored dictionary of media and communication for Peter Lang Publishing. Her essays have been published in scholarly journals, such as Management Communication Quarterly, The Iowa Journal of Communication, and The Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, and in books, such as Online Social Research: Methods, Issues, & Ethics (Peter Lang, 2004) and The Encyclopedia of International Media and Communications (Academic Press, 2003). She has received numerous academic awards, including the Outstanding Faculty Scholar Award from Quinnipiac University and the
Anson Rowe Prize from Cornell University. An avid mountain biker, golfer, photographer, and yoga practitioner, she lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Contributors

Corey Anton (Ph.D., Purdue University) is associate professor of communication studies at Grand Valley State University. He has presented over 40 conference papers and addresses at national conferences and has published over 24 scholarly articles in journals such as Communication Theory, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Human Studies, Explorations in Media Ecology, Semiotica, ETC, The Atlantic Journal of Communication, Communication Studies, and The American Journal of Semiotics. His book Selfhood and Authenticity (State University of New York Press, 2001) was spotlighted at the National Communication Association Convention in 2002 and received the Erving Goffman Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Social Interaction from the Media Ecology Association in 2004.

Dominika Bednarska, a doctoral student in English and disability studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is writing a dissertation on representations of disability, gender, and sexuality in twentieth-century fiction. Her writing has appeared in What I Want from You: An Anthology of East Bay Lesbian Poets, Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, and the Bellevue Literary Review.

Brenda L. Berkelaar is a doctoral student and Andrews Fellow in the Department of Communication at Purdue University. She holds an M.A. from Seton Hall University. Her research focuses on the intersections of technology, organizations, and careers. She currently studies career choice and constructions of science, technology, and engineering careers in China, Belgium, and the United States. Her work has appeared in Management Communication Quarterly, and she has publications forthcoming in Communication Yearbook and in another edited volume.

Mickey Brazeal spent about 30 years in the advertising business, the last 10 as executive creative director of Grey Advertising/Chicago. His most recent work includes national television campaigns for car waxes, corn herbicides, shampoos, spice blends, stock options, fuel additives, fruit juices, food stores, drugstores, deodorants, real estate companies, and dot-coms. During the dot-com madness, he helped launch several Internet businesses, some of which still exist. His creative awards include Addies, Tellies, Eagles, Towers, Windys, Louies, Mobius awards, NAMA Gold, an Effie, a Clio, and the Gallagher Report’s Broken Pencil Award for “the most obnoxious TV commercial we’ve seen this month.” While working as a creative director, he taught at Northwestern University. He has served as assistant director of the marketing communications program at the Illinois Institute of Technology Stuart School of Business and is currently assistant professor of marketing communication at Roosevelt University. His book RFID and the Customer Experience was published by Paramount in 2008.

Michael Bugeja is professor and director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University of Science and Technology. He is the author of 21 books, including Living Ethics across Media Platforms (Oxford University Press, 2008) and the award-winning Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age (Oxford University Press, 2005). His commentaries on media ethics and technology have been cited internationally in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, The Guardian (UK), Toronto Globe & Mail (Canada), Die Welt (Germany), China Daily, The International Herald Tribune (France), The Ecologist (UK), The Futurist, and the Associated Press, as well as in online news editions of CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News. He writes regularly as a new media critic for The Chronicle of Higher Education. His scholarship appears in numerous publications, including Journalism Quarterly, Journalism Educator, Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, Journal of Mass Media Ethics, and New Media and Society. He is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow with creative writing in Harper’s, Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and Georgia Review, among others. Prior to coming to Iowa State, he was special assistant to the president at Ohio University and associate director of and a professor in the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism. He has worked as reporter, correspondent, and state editor for United Press International. He holds an M.S. in mass communications from South Dakota State University and a Ph.D. in English from Oklahoma State University.

Carrie A. Bulger is associate professor of psychology at Quinnipiac University. She has a Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology from the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on issues concerning employee stress, health, well-being, and attitudes. She has studied organizational stressors, such as work-personal life conflict, sexual harassment, and attitudes toward participation in unions. Her recent research has focused on the ways that information and communication technologies are impacting the boundaries around and between work and home and outcomes for employees. She has presented her research at national and international conferences and has been published in journals such as the Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, and Sex Roles.

Gene Burd teaches qualitative research methods and news reporting and writing at the University of Texas at Austin and previously worked on several newspapers, including the Kansas City Star, Houston Chronicle, Albuquerque Journal, and suburban weeklies in Los Angeles and Chicago. He was previously on the faculty at Minnesota and Marquette, and he attended UCLA, Iowa, and Northwestern (Ph.D., 1964). His specialty is urban journalism, and he was the founding benefactor of The Urban Communication Foundation.

Patrice M. Buzzanell (Ph.D., Purdue University) is professor and W. Charles and Ann Redding Faculty Fellow in the Department of Communication at Purdue University. Her primary interest is in organizational communication, specializing in career, leadership, gender, and work-life issues. She has edited Rethinking Organizational and Managerial Communication from Feminist Perspectives (2000), Gender in Applied Communication Contexts (with H. Sterk and L. Turner, 2004), and Distinctive Qualities in Communication Research (with D. Carbaugh, 2009). She has published over 75 book chapters and articles in journals such as Communication Monographs, Human Communication Research, Communication Theory, and Human Relations.

André H. Caron (Ed.D., Harvard University, 1976) is full professor in the Communication Department of the University of Montreal and Bell Canada Chair in Interdisciplinary Research on Emerging Technologies. He is founding director of the Center for Youth and Media Studies (1987) and of CITÉ (2000), an interdisciplinary research center on emerging technologies. He has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University, Harvard University, the University of Leicester, and the University of Bologna. A specialist in mass media and new technologies, his research interests include broadcasting policy, political and cultural appropriations of media, and the influences of new technologies on society. He has carried out numerous quantitative investigations on the diffusion and adoption of interactive technologies in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Some of his more recent work about mobile culture has been published in Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. He is coauthor of two recent books on this topic, Culture Mobile: Les Nouvelles Pratiques de Communication (Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2005) and Moving Cultures: Mobile Communication in Everyday Life (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007).

Letizia Caronia (Ph.D., University of Bologna) is professor in the Department of Education at the University of Bologna in Italy and visiting researcher at the Center for Youth and Media Studies and at CITÉ at the University of Montreal in Canada. Her research focuses on the use of the media as a situated activity and cultural practice. For the past 15 years she has conducted qualitative and ethnographic research on the role of everyday language, interactions, and culture in the process of the domestication of information and communication technologies. She has published numerous books, articles, and essays on the relationship between everyday language, media uses, and educational practices. Her recent work includes “Growing Up Wireless: Being a Parent and Being a Child in the Age of Mobile Communication” in Digital Literacy: Tools and Methodologies for Information Society (IGI Publishing, 2008); “Television Culture and Media Socialization across Countries: Theoretical Issues and Methodological Approaches,” with A. H. Caron, in the International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture (Sage, 2008); and “Mobile Culture: An Ethnography of Cellular Phone Use in Teenagers’ Everyday Life” (Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2005). She coauthored with A. H. Caron Moving Cultures: Mobile Communication in Everyday Life (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007).

Suzy D’Enbeau (Ph.D., Purdue University) is assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. Her primary interest is in organizational communication, specializing in feminist theory, consumerism, and work-life issues. She holds an M.A. from Duquesne University. Her work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, Qualitative Inquiry, and Women’s Studies in Communication.

David F. Donnelly is dean of graduate studies at Chatham University. He has contributed to eight books on the media and has published in numerous journals, including Communication Research, Telematics and Informatics, New Telecomm Quarterly, and The Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television. His research interests include the impact of technological innovation and media forecasting. He has also served as a media consultant for many national clients and as a freelance video producer on numerous productions, including Visual Velocity, which aired on PBS stations. He earned a Ph.D. and an M.A. from the University of Massachusetts and a B.A. from the University of Maryland.

Howard Giles (Ph.D., D.Sc., University of Bristol) is assistant dean of undergraduate education and professor (and past-chair) of communication at the University of California at Santa Barbara, with affiliated positions in linguistics and psychology. His work is in the general area of intergroup communication with a particular cross-cultural interest in intergenerational encounters as well as police-civilian interactions. He is founding editor of the Journal of Language and Social Psychology and the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication and former editor of Human Communication Research. He is also a former president of the International Communication Association as well as the International Association of Language and Social Psychology.

Annis G. Golden is an assistant professor in the Communication Department at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her research, which has appeared in Communication Yearbook, Human Relations, and Management Communication Quarterly, focuses on women’s and men’s communicative management of their relationships to the organizations that employ them, including the ways in which these relationships are mediated by new information and communication technologies. She also studies women’s health issues, with a particular interest in how women negotiate their relationships to healthcare organizations and the role of race and ethnicity, class, and community in this process. She holds an M.A. in English from Syracuse University and a Ph.D. in communication from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Jarice Hanson is professor of communication in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, and currently holds the Verizon Chair in Telecommunications in the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University in Philadelphia. After a career in the television industry, she pursued graduate work, thinking she would write, direct, and produce television programs. It was her good fortune to find that the answers to the important questions about media and technology were better found by academic research, and since making the critical turn, she has produced 19 books and dozens of scholarly articles. Her current research deals with access to telecommunications technologies by marginalized individuals, such as the socio-economically challenged, the disabled, and women, and changes to media and information technology industries related to changing social, political, and economic policies.

Mark E. Hoffman is professor of computer science in the Department of Computer Science and Interactive Digital Design at Quinnipiac University. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Polytechnic University of Brooklyn, New York. Prior to joining the Quinnipiac faculty, he taught high school mathematics for 14 years followed by 16 years managing information systems for a small manufacturing company. He has presented at conferences and published in journals in technical and educational computer science, industrial and organizational psychology, and writing across the curriculum. Among other projects, he continues to study the impacts of computing technology in the workplace, at home, and on the boundaries surrounding each.

Yvonne Houy received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was first introduced to sustainability issues in economics and architecture courses. Her M.A. and Ph.D. are from Cornell University. Her most recent published works are about the impact of mobile technologies on urban community design and individual neuropsychology.

J. David Johnson (Ph.D., Michigan State University, 1978) has been dean of the College of Communications and Information Studies at the University of Kentucky since 1998. He has held academic positions at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Arizona State University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Michigan State University and was a media research analyst for the U.S. Information Agency. He has been recognized as among the 100 most prolific authors of refereed journal articles in the communication discipline. He has been conducting network analysis, innovation, and information research for over three decades.

Nathan Jurgenson, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Maryland, is working with George Ritzer on the theoretical implications of the bottom-up turn taken by the Internet—what has come to be known as Web 2.0. His future work will involve rethinking how sociological theory (especially postmodern thought) orients our understanding of Web 2.0, and, in turn, how Web 2.0 provides fertile ground to rethink sociological theory in areas such as knowledge production, the presentation of self, consumption, authority, exploitation, and many others. He received his M.A. in sociology from Northern Illinois University in 2007.

Julian Kilker (Ph.D., Cornell University) is associate professor of emerging technologies in the Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He researches socio-technical interaction, with current projects examining user control and unintended consequences in emerging media and comparative life cycles in traditional and emerging media. His work has been published in Management Communication Quarterly, Convergence, IEEE Technology and Society, Social Identities, and Visual Communication Quarterly.

Penny A. Leisring is associate professor of psychology at Quinnipiac University. She holds a B.A. in psychology and child development from Connecticut College and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her clinical interests focus on the prevention and reduction of aggressive behavior in adults and children. She conducts research examining male- and female-perpetrated intimate partner violence. Her work has been published in numerous journals, including the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment, and Trauma; Violence and Victims; and the Journal of Comparative Family Studies. She serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment, and Trauma.

Mikaela L. Marlow (Ph.D., University of California at Santa Barbara) is assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Communication Studies at the University of Idaho. She explores theoretical and applied intergroup communication among diverse language, ethnic, and cultural groups. Her research has been published in Communication Yearbook, Human Communication Research, and the Journal of Multicultural Discourses. She has served as Student Board Representative for the International Communication Association.

Michael L. Maynard (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is associate professor and inaugural chair of the Department of Advertising in the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University in Philadelphia. His research areas include mass media analysis, the relationship between mass communication and culture, as well as textual analysis of Japanese television and print advertising. His work has been published in journals such as Public Relations Review, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, Keio Communication Review, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Journal of Literary Semantics, and Journal of Popular Culture.

Daniel G. McDonald (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, 1983) is professor of communication at Ohio State University. His research focuses on media audiences, especially in the area of intra-audience effects. Most recently, he has studied the social nature of the media experience, focusing on a blend of interpersonal and mass communication processes.

Jingbo Meng, who is from China, is a doctoral student in communication at the University of Southern California. She holds a B.A. in journalism and economics from Peking University and an M.A. in communication from Ohio State University. Her research focuses on mass media effects and audiences.

Peg Oliveira is an early care and education research and policy consultant. She has worked as a senior policy fellow for the nonprofit child advocacy organization Connecticut Voices for Children. In addition, she is a yoga teacher in New Haven, Connecticut. She has attained the highest level of certification with the Yoga Alliance (500-Hour Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher) and has also been certified by the Baptiste Power Yoga Institute. She holds a B.A. in psychology and in English composition from Fairfield University and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in social and developmental psychology from Brandeis University.

Holly Parker lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and doesn’t own a car. Instead she has 14 cars (thanks to Zipcar), 3 bikes, and trains every 20 minutes to New York City. She believes that everyone would be much happier if they would park their car at home and walk, bicycle, and use public transportation whenever possible. For the past 12 years, she has been an enthusiastic advocate and manager of sustainable transportation programs. She is director of sustainable transportation systems at Yale University where she develops and implements programs that encourage the university community to use more environmentally friendly modes of transportation. For the six years prior to her appointment at Yale, she managed Harvard University’s CommuterChoice Program. Before that, she worked at the Commuter Solutions Program at Lane Transit District in Eugene, Oregon, and as a senior transportation coordinator for a consulting firm in Waltham, Massachusetts.

George Ritzer is distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland. Among his awards: Honorary Doctorate from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia; Honorary Patron, University Philosophical Society from Trinity College, Dublin; and the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Contribution to Teaching Award. He has chaired the American Sociological Association’s Section on Theoretical Sociology, as well as the Section on Organizations and Occupations. Among his books in metatheory are Sociology: A Multiple Paradigm Science (1975/1980) and Metatheorizing in Sociology (1991). In the application of social theory to the social world, his books include The McDonaldization of Society (5th ed., 2008), Enchanting a Disenchanted World (2nd ed., 2005), and The Globalization of Nothing (2nd ed., 2007). He is currently working on The Outsourcing of Everything (with Craig Lair, Oxford University Press, forthcoming) and Globalization: A Basic Text (Blackwell, forthcoming). He was founding editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture. He edited The Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists (2000) and The Blackwell Companion to Globalization (2008) and coedited the Handbook of Social Theory (2001). He also edited the 11-volume Encyclopedia of Sociology (2007) and the 2-volume Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2005). His books have been translated into over 20 languages, with more than a dozen translations of The McDonaldization of Society alone.