Katherine Cramer, Senior Associate (B.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1994, Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2000) is Interim Director of the Morgridge Center for Public Service and a Professor in the Department of Political Science. Her work focuses on the way people in the United States make sense of politics and their place in it. She is known for her innovative approach to the study of public opinion, in which she invites herself into the conversations of groups of people to listen to the way they understand public affairs. She is also published as Katherine Cramer Walsh and is the author of Talking about Race: Community Dialogues and the Politics of Difference (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Talking about Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life (University of Chicago Press, 2004). She is the recipient of the 2012 APSA Qualitative and Multi-Methods Research Section award for the best qualitative or multi-method submission to the American Political Science Review.
Lucas Graves, Associate (Ph.D., Communications, Columbia University, 2012) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. His research focuses on new organizations and practices in the emerging news ecosystem, and more broadly on the challenges which digital, networked communications pose to established media and political institutions. He is currently at work on a book about the fact-checking movement in American journalism. Graves has written and spoken on a wide number of topics relating to new media, including blogs and “annotative journalism”; open-source culture and copyright reform; and the technical and political roots of “network neutrality.” He co-authored the first two reports published by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia’s journalism school, on Internet advertising metrics and on business models for online news. He is also a research fellow at the New America Foundation and writes occasionally for the Columbia Journalism Review and for the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University.
Young Mie Kim, Associate (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004) is an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Donovan Wright Faculty Fellow of the College of Letters and Science. Kim’s research concerns politics in the digital age, and specifically, the role digital media play in political communication among political leaders, advocacy groups, and citizens. Her research demonstrates that the digital media environment has set a condition to facilitate the development of passionate publics who care about a particular issue almost exclusively based on their values, identities, and self-interests. Kim has collected a number of prestigious awards including the Best Article of the Year in Political Communication (by the joint division of Political Communication of the International Communication Association and American Political Science Association). Her research has appeared in flagship journals in the fields of Communication and Political Science such as the Journal of Politics, Journal of Communication, Communication Research and others. Kim was a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK and obtained her Ph.D. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Lindsay Palmer, Associate (Ph.D., Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2014) is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW-Madison. She studies global media ethics from a humanist perspective, especially focusing on the cultural labor of conflict correspondents in the digital age. Palmer’s scholarly work has appeared in the peer-reviewed journals Genders, Feminist Review, Television and New Media, and Continuum: a Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, as well as in various edited collections. Her forthcoming book is called Surviving the Story: Cultures of Conflict Correspondence after 9/11 (University of Illinois Press).
Zhongdang Pan, Senior Associate (Ph.D., Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1990) is a professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Before joining the University of Wisconsin faculty, he spent five years teaching in Hong Kong and conducting research on media and social changes in the People’s Republic of China. His research focuses on mediated communication in politics and public life. He has published research on news framing and its effects, significance of political talk, implications of perceptions of media effects, news production and media effects on values in China, and civic implications of the Internet in China.
Manisha Pathak-Shelat, Associate (Ph.D., Mass Communication with a minor in Gender & Women’s Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2014; Ph.D., Education, The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India, 1997) is an associate professor and chair, Communication Area at MICA, Ahmedabad, India, where she is also an affiliated faculty with the Center for Social Change Leadership. Her work concerns new media, civic engagement, gender, media and information literacy, and youth media cultures. Her current research examines the Internet and the emerging civic culture of transcultural citizenship among women in several different countries. Her work has been published in journals such as New Media & Society, Journal of Children and Media, and MediaAsia. She is also a collaborator on a digital archive of feminist grassroot political media from South Asia hosted by the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections. She has received a number of awards and fellowships including The Soviet Land Nehru Award, Shastri Indo-Canadian Faculty Research Award, Salzburg Seminar Fellowship, and TATA Fellowship for the Study of Contemporary India.
Sue Robinson, Associate (Ph.D., Mass Media and Communication, Temple University, 2007) is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication. She teaches and researches journalism theory and professional skills, digital technologies, and informations flows and networks. Currently she is writing a book about how digital social networks can reconfigure patterns of deliberative talk such that marginalized voices are amplified in mainstream information flows. She has been published widely, including in Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, and Mass Communication & Society.
Dhavan V. Shah, Senior Associate (Ph.D., Mass Communication and Political Psychology, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, 1999) is Maier-Bascom Professor at the University of Wisconsin, where he is Director of the Mass Communication Research Center (MCRC) and Scientific Director in the Center for Health Enhancement System Studies (CHESS). His work concerns framing and cueing effects on social judgments, digital media influence on civic and political engagement, and the impact of ICTs on chronic disease management. Across these domains of work, he has increasingly applied computational techniques to tackle social science questions. He is housed in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, with appointments in Industrial and Systems Engineering, Marketing, and Political Science.
Michael W. Wagner, Associate (Ph.D., Political Science, Indiana University, 2006) is assistant professor and Louis A. Maier Faculty Fellow in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at UW-Madison where he directs the Physiology and Communication Effects (PACE) Lab. He is also affiliated with the Department of Political Science. He earned his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 2006. Wagner studies how different elements of the information environment interact with social and individual-level factors to affect people’s preferences, partisanship and political behaviors. Wagner has published his research in books such as Political Behavior of the American Electorate (2014, CQ Press, with William Flanigan, Nancy Zingale, and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse) and in journals such as Journalism and Communication Monographs, Annual Review of Political Science, Journalism Practice, International Journal of Public Opinion Research and several other journals and edited books. With Ted Carmines and Mike Ensley, he is completing a book called Beyond the Left-Right Divide: How the Multidimensional Character of Mass Policy Preferences Affects American Politics (University of Chicago Press). He is also a regular contributor to PBS’ MediaShift. A winner of multiple classroom awards, Wagner teaches courses in political communication, political behavior, the physiology of communication effects and journalism.
Christopher Wells, Associate (Ph.D., Communication, University of Washington, 2011) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication. His writing concerns communications processes underpinning democratic culture and citizenship; biases of information processing in public opinion formation; the evolution of citizenship practice and communication’s role in that evolution; and how individuals and institutions are adapting to the digital media environment. His book, The Civic Organization and the Digital Citizen: Communicating Engagement in a Networked Age, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2015.
Michael Xenos, Senior Associate (Ph.D., University of Washington, 2005) is a Professor of Communication Science and currently serves as Chair of the Department of Communication Arts. He is also an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Life Sciences Communication, as well as the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science, with a concentration in Political Communication, at the University of Washington. His research is focused on the effects of new media on political engagement, public deliberation, and campaigns and elections. Recently he has focused on the potential for social media to help young people learn about politics and engage in a variety of participatory behaviors. His work has been published in journals such as Political Communication, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Political Analysis. He also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Information Technology & Politics, the official journal of the Information Technology and Politics section of the American Political Science Association.