Included in this year's issue:
The 2020 edition of our departments Ezine is now available! Included in this year's issue: Dr. Black Explores Canadian Culture, Breaking Barriers for Transitioning Citizens, LEADS Program Enhances Students' Education,Dr. Jiang Researches in Rio De Janeiro, Interview Fashion Show Workshop and much more!
As we monitor novel coronavirus (COVID-19), we are committed to supporting students, faculty and staff and ensuring that all students can fulfill their academic requirements as planned. LEARN MORE.
They had questions, he had answers -- and both are available online! Dr. Dan Grano, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, recently shared his thoughts about his new book, The Eternal Present of Sport: Rethinking Sport and Religion, with Religion Dispatches, a series from USC Annenberg.
In the Q&A interview, Grano explains how some scholars see sport as "a form of 'civil religion' that creates social cohesion around shared values and rituals.
"I started to think about how crises in elite sport were taking shape around foundational religious ideals," Grano added. "To cite a couple of examples from my book: fans and sportswriters have long emphasized how elite athletic accomplishments prove we can “transcend” previously-held limits in human potential, yet performance enhancement (doping, prosthetics) visibly shifts the bases of that transcendence from human to extrahuman sources of agency; or, live sport broadcasts remain the most valuable television commodity in the world in large part because of religious ideals surrounding the “witnessing” of history, but contemporary media technologies (especially instant replay) train viewers to question leagues’ and governing bodies’ authority over determining outcomes and writing histories."
Read the rest at: http://religiondispatches.org/a-whole-new-ball-game-new-book-rethinks-the-history-of-religion-in-sport/
Just in case you aren't feeling your first full day of classes, here's some touching news from Dr. Rachel Plotnick, Communication Studies Department Assistant Professor.
Her article on haptic media, "Force, flatness and touch without feeling: Thinking historically about haptics and buttons," was published last week in New Media and Society: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1461444817717510.
A forceful congratulations to Dr. Plotnick!
It's here! Hot off the virtual presses is the 2017 Communication Matters departmental ezine. Read great stories about current students, alums, faculty and all the other Department of Communication accomplishments this academic year. With Editor Cheryl Spainhour, Student Contributors Amanda Lea and Alex Richardson and Designer Leigh Ann Privette, there's great stuff on every page.
Click and enjoy: https://issuu.com/communicationstudies/docs/dept._ezine_2017
Download the PDF version here.