Professor Hyunjin Seo received a Pandemic Assistance and Vaccine Equity (PAVE) Grant Award from the Kansas Department of Health & Environment. Through this program, the KU Center for Digital Inclusion will conduct COVID-19 vaccine campaigns among vaccine-hesitant women in Kansas utilizing virtual reality (VR) content developed based on the center’s empirical research. 

Professor Hyunjin Seo and doctoral students Annalise Baines, Matthew Blomberg and Darcey Altschwager co-authored two papers accepted for presentation at the 2022 International Communication Association conference in May. They are “Online Information Perception and COVID-19 Vaccination Status: A Survey of Socioeconomically Marginalized Women in the U.S.” and “Socioeconomically Disadvantaged Women’s Online Privacy Perceptions: A Three-Group Comparison of Digital Competency and Literacy.”

Lisa McLendon, Bremner Editing Center coordinator, had two proposals accepted for the 2022 national conference of ACES: The Society for Editing: “Grammar Obscura” and “Nuts and Bolts Grammar.” 

Stephen Wolgast, Knight Chair in Audience and Community Engagement for News, published a review of three new photojournalism books in News Photographer, an online magazine, in January. He reviewed “Dust,” Patrick Wack’s examination of how the Chinese government treats Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province and the obstacles Beijing placed before Wack as he conducted his work. In “Brink,” photojournalist David Butow covered the way Donald Trump reached voters in the 2016 presidential campaign and then the Trump presidency, going places that many media critics later said journalists had ignored. The Danish photographer Jacob Ehrbahn documented the many methods migrants take to reach Europe, putting himself in many of the same dangerous conditions the immigrants faced.

Associate Professor Mugur Geana's co-authored research paper “We trust what we think we know: Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views on controversial scientific issues” has been selected for presentation at the 72nd Annual ICA Conference, One World, One Network‽, to be held May 26-30 in Paris, France. Attitudes that lead to behaviors inconsistent with scientific consensus are dangerous, and understanding their origins has proven challenging. The paper, which presents the results from five studies (N=5,433) on life-altering scientific issues, suggests that the people who disagree the most with the scientific consensus have the slightest actual knowledge but think they know the most about those issues. The research was conducted in collaboration with scholars from Brown University, the University of Colorado and Portland State University.

Associate Professor Teri Finneman and co-authors Meg Heckman and Pamela Walck recently had the article "Reimagining Journalistic Roles: How Student Journalists Are Taking On the U.S. News Desert Crisis" accepted in Journalism Studies. All three faculty members advised online publications created to serve news desert communities. Finneman is the founder and publisher of The Eudora Times, which is staffed with KU J-School student reporters.

Finneman also will speak on a research panel about rural journalism during the National Summit on Journalism in Rural America this summer.

Doctoral candidate Muhammad Ittefaq’s study titled “A pandemic of hate: Social representations of COVID-19 in the media” has been published in Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy. In the study, the authors evaluated 451 articles from The New York Times, The Guardian and China Daily. The findings of the study revealed four major themes: the virus' portrayal as a threat; the racialization of COVID-19 as a multi-faceted threat; calls for collectivization to curb the racialization of the virus; and speculative solutions to end discrimination against Asians. Ittefaq co-authored this work with doctoral candidate Mauryne Abwao, doctoral student Annalise Baines, Associate Professor Genelle Belmas, Assistant Professor Ever Josue Figueroa, and Dr. Shafiq Ahmad Kamboh from Universität Bremen, Germany. The online first version of the journal article is available here. The article will be free to access for the next 60 days. 

Pat Gaston, the Lacy C. Haynes Professor of Journalism, has joined the Public Scholars Group, which is a partnership between the Center for Faculty Development and Mentoring, Hall Center for the Humanities and KU Center for Research. The Public Scholars Group is a valuable professional development opportunity for faculty to make the relevance of their scholarly research visible beyond academia.

Associate Professor Emeritus David Guth has signed a contract with Page Publishing of Conneaut Lake, Pennsylvania, for the publication of his novel, “Thirteen Minutes: Death of an American High School.” It chronicles the causes and effects of a mass casualty shooting at a fictitious rural high school.

Associate Professor Carol Holstead judged the Design category of the National Magazine Awards, the most prestigious awards in American Magazines, over two days the week of Jan. 10. This is the seventh time Holstead has judged the awards, which are sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors. 

Pat Gaston, the Lacy C. Haynes Professor of Journalism, was a featured guest on KCUR’s Up to Date program last month discussing “Is Journalism Dying?” Listen to the segment here.

Student Services staff members changed offices over the semester break. Frances Lyons, assistant dean for Student Services, is in Room 120, Stauffer-Flint. Steve Rottinghaus, career and outreach coordinator, moved across the hall to Room 117D. Himée Kamatuka, recruitment coordinator and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Curator for the school, is in Room 209C. Academic advisors Dan McCarthy and Eddie Muñoz remain in the Stauffer-Flint 117 suite.

The University Daily Kansan and the Jayhawk Media Group offer opportunities for students to show their skills and learn as they manage a modern media company. Positions are available for students interested in advertising, marketing, events and business as well as news, features, sports, photography, video and more. Please contact Kansan General Manager and Adviser Rob Karwath at [email protected] or 785-864-4477.