Stephen Bates (Journalism and Media Studies) recently published “The Strange Tale of Rincon Island,” recounting an artificial island built off the California coast for oil and gas exploration in the 1950s, before the state allowed offshore platforms. Operator Richfield Oil Corp. subsequently created an adjacent artificial reef to increase fish…

Arthur D. Soto-Vásquez (Journalism and Media Studies), with co-editors Kim Fox (American University in Cairo) and Aram Sinnreich (American University), recently guest edited a symposium on "The Turn to Podcasts as a Mass Campaign Medium" in The Journal of Radio and Audio Media. The set of research articles focuses on when podcasting’s…

Arthur D. Soto-Vásquez (Journalism and Media Studies), with co-authors Ariadne Gonzalez, Di Mu, Marcela Moran, and Cindy Salazar-Collier (all Texas A&M International University), earned the Top Paper Award in the Health Communication Interest Group at the 2026 Central States Communication Association. The paper was titled, "From Focus Groups…

Rebecca Rice (Communication Studies) published "High Reliability Organizations" in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication.

Arthur D. Soto-Vásquez (Journalism and Media Studies) delivered an invited talk titled "Latino Shift: The Making and Remaking of the U.S. Latino Voter in the Trump Era" for the Center for Global Change and Media in the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. Through an analysis of media coverage, election data, and…

Ashlee Frandell (Public Policy), Aya Shata (Journalism and Media Studies), and Drew Blasco (Public Health) were awarded the iRDA Sustainability in Arid Lands Funding grant to support research on local county governments' adoption of AI, focusing on challenges, resource limitations, and strategies to enable effective and responsible…

Aya Shata (Journalism and Media Studies) and Ashlee Frandell (Public Policy) were awarded the iRDA Creative Media, Entertainment, and Cultural Industries Funding Competition to support research examining public communications professionals’ trust in generative AI and its influence on communication practices in the government sector.

Hannah Novak and Tara McManus (both Communication Studies) published their article "'But What About Me?': How Memorable Messages Received During Catholic Sex Education Contribute to the Development of Identity Gaps." The study involved in-depth interviews with 15 participants to explore how memorable messages received in Catholic sex education…

Arthur D. Soto-Vásquez (Journalism and Media Studies), earned a Top Paper Award (Runner-Up) in the Communication Theory and Research Interest Group at the 2026 Western States Communication Association. The paper was titled, "Etiological Myth in U.S. Right-Wing Politics." The paper advances an etiological approach to studying political rhetoric and…

Emma Frances Bloomfield (Communication Studies) published an Element in the Cambridge University Press series "Public Engagement with Science," titled, "Mothers as Science Storytellers." In the book, she considers the ways that mothers serve as gatekeepers of scientific knowledge and as powerful science communicators across the controversies of…

David R. Gruber (Communication Studies) published an article titled, "There is No Language for AI to Speak: A Meditation on Language, Faith, and our Dogmatic AI". This five-part essay appeared in the journal Rhizomes. The essay explores the fundamental instability of language and its implications for artificial intelligence. Gruber argues that…

Alexandra Nur (Criminal Justice) and her colleagues Holly Nguyen and Brandy Parker from the Department of Sociology & Criminology at Pennsylvania State University recently published an article in Social Science Research  titled, "Criminal legal contact, labor market insecurity and labor market participation." In this article, the authors…