Andrea Alarcon (Fourth Year)

• With Nancy Baym and Lana Swartz (PhD 2015), “Sonic Publics / Convening Technologies: Blockchain and the Music Industry,” International Journal of Communication
• With Jeeyun Sophia Baik (Fourth Year) and Do Own Donna Kim (Fourth Year), presented ""Everyone deserves a smartphone?" Understanding the media's legitimation of mobile technology use by Syrian refugees" at ICA 2019

Soledad Altrudi (Fourth Year)

• With Associate Professor Christina Dunbar-Hester, participated in a by-invitation workshop coordinated by Professor Chris Kelty at UCLA: “The Political Rationalities of Conservation and Maintenance: Animals, Infrastructure, Expertise.”
• With Associate Professor Christina Dunbar-Hester and Kate Miltner (PhD 2019) presented “Interspecies Texting? Agency and Intimacy in the Anthropocene” at ICA 2019 (Philosophy, Theory & Critique section)

Jeeyun Sophia Baik (Fourth Year)

• With Andrea Alarcon (Fourth Year) and Do Own Donna Kim (Fourth Year), presented ""Everyone deserves a smartphone?" Understanding the media's legitimation of mobile technology use by Syrian refugees" at ICA 2019
• Presented “Data privacy and public distrust of institutions: Early discourse of the U.S. consumer privacy regulations on Twitter” at the 10th International Conference on Social Media & Society in Toronto
• With Hyun Tae Calvin Kim (ABD), Nathaniel Ming Curran (ABD), Associate Professor Patricia Riley, and Professor Tom Hollihan presented “Outside Looking In? A Qualitative Analysis of Pro-North Korean Blogspace” at the ICA 2019 North Korea Media pre-conference
• With Nathaniel Ming Curran (ABD), Hyun Tae Calvin Kim (ABD), Professor Tom Hollihan, and Associate Professor Patricia Riley presented “North Korean Social Media Diplomacy on Threat and Risk: From Rocket Man to the Red Carpet” at ICA 2019 (Public Diplomacy division)

TJ Billard (ABD)

• Quoted by Mother Jones in “Dating While Trans Is Complicated. HBO’s Euphoria Pushed Me to Unpack My Online Romances”

Sierra Bray (Third Year)

• Presented “Moms Who Code: Unfit for the Job? Analyzing Bias Toward Female Software Engineers on LinkedIn” at ICA 2019

Matthew Le Bui (ABD)

• With Rachel Moran (ABD), “Race, ethnicity, and telecommunications policy issues of access and representation: Centering communities of color and their concerns,” Telecommunications Policy
• With Marina Litvinsky (ABD) and Andrea Wenzel (PhD 2017), presented as part of a panel on “Communicating in the City, Communication about the City” at the 2019 Urban Affairs Association Conference
• Participated in a two-day workshop on the topic of "Datafication and Community Activism," hosted by the UCI Department of Informatics
• Organized and and participated in a conference panel for the 2019 Critical Race & Digital Studies conference, "Justice, Inclusion, and Imagining and Building Alternative Platforms"
• Participated in the tenth annual ICA Communication and Technology (CAT) doctoral consortium
• Presented "Yelp and racial capitalism: Location-based applications and imagining data justice in the segregated technopolis" at ICA 2019 
• Led a critical data studies workshop for 60+ participants at the Digital Democracies Conference, hosted by Simon Fraser University's Digital Democracies Group
• Participated in a roundtable discussion on "Future Questions for Media Studies" at the Digital Democracies Conference
• Gave the Urban Communication keynote talk, "(Re)Claiming the 'Smart' City: Urban Datafication and the Racial Politics of Visibility," at the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) Conference in Madrid, with responses from Stefania Milan, Nico Carpentier, Gary Gumpert, and Susan Drucker. 

Suk Young Choi (Second Year)

• With Eun-mee Kim, presented “Social Comparison or Emotional Contagion? Comparing Two Mechanisms Underlying the Association between Instagram Browsing and Subjective Well-being” at ICA 2019
• With Eun-Ju Lee and Hye-Yon Lee, presented “Ephemeral or Permanent? Effects of Social Media Record Duration on Self-concept Change via Perceived Audience Size” at ICA 2019
• With Eun-Ju Lee and Hye-Yon Lee, presented “To Err Is Human? Ironic Effects of Politicians’ Twitter Blunders via Perceived Authenticity of Twitter Communication” at ICA 2019

Courtney Cox (PhD 2019)

• With Perry B. Johnson (ABD) presented “‘Superbowling’ for Change: The Acoustic Territory of the Super Bowl Halftime Show” at ICA 2019
• With Perry B. Johnson (ABD) presented “'I Said No to the Super Bowl': The Politics of Performance and Refusal in Super Bowl Halftime Shows, 1991-2018" at the Cultural Studies Association conference

Ignacio Cruz (ABD)

• Selected to attend the 2019 Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme at the University of Oxford
• Selected to attend the 2019 Knowledge, Information and Innovation Research (KIN) Summer School at the KIN Center for Digital Innovation and the Amsterdam Business Research Institute (ABRI) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands)

Nathaniel Ming Curran (ABD)

• With Jenna Gibson (U Chicago), "Conflict and Responsibility: Content Analysis of American News Media Organizations’ Framing of North Korea," Media, War & Conflict
• With Joo-Wha Hong (Second Year), “Artificial Intelligence, Artists, and Art: Attitudes Toward Artwork Produced by Humans vs. AI,”  ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications  
• With Do Own Donna Kim (Fourth Year) and Hyun Tae Calvin Kim (ABD) presented “Appropriation, Conflation, and Othering: A Thematic Analysis of South Korean Twitter Discourse on the Jeju Yemeni Refugees” at ICA 2019 (Ethnicity and Race in Communication division)
• With Jeeyun Sophia Baik (Fourth Year), Hyun Tae Calvin Kim (ABD), Professor Tom Hollihan, and Associate Professor Patricia Riley presented “North Korean Social Media Diplomacy on Threat and Risk: From Rocket Man to the Red Carpet” at ICA 2019 (Public Diplomacy division)
• With Hyun Tae Calvin Kim (ABD), Jeeyun Sophia Baik (Fourth Year), Associate Professor Patricia Riley, and Professor Tom Hollihan presented “Outside Looking In? A Qualitative Analysis of Pro-North Korean Blogspace” at the ICA 2019 North Korea Media pre-conference
• Presented “Face-to-Face, Screen-to-Screen: italki, Pop Cosmopolitanism, and the Korean Wave,” at the 8th Korean Screen Cultures Conference in Preston, England
• Presented “Digital Interventions at the Language-Nation Nexus” at the 2019 Shenzhen Forum
• Selected to attend the 2019 Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme at the University of Oxford
• Received a 2019 summer field grant from the USC Korean Studies Institute to travel to Korea and conduct research

Traci Gillig (PhD 2019)

• “Gender Identity,” The International Encyclopedia of Media Psychology (Ed. Jan Van den Bulck)
• With Professor Lynn Miller, Liyuan Leah Wang (ABD), and David Jeong (PhD 2017), "Bringing the 'Real World' into the Experimental Lab: Technology-enabling Transformative Designs." In P. Davis, A. O’Mahony, & J. Pfautz (Eds.) Social Behavioral Science Modeling.
• Moderated the youth empowerment panel at the USC OWN It Women’s Leadership Summit

Daria Griffith (Second Year)

• Book review, Stop the Press: How the Mormon Church Tried to Silence the Salt Lake Tribune, International Journal of Communication
• Presented “Not You Again! Print Media’s Source Selection and Governmental Bias: A Content Analysis of Keystone XL Pipeline Coverage” at ICA 2019
• With Ashley Phelps (Second Year) presented “Unread Emails Cannot Heal Wounds: University Crisis Response After Breach of Trust” at ICA 2019

Joo-Wha Hong (Third Year)

• With Associate Professor Dmitri Williams, “Racism, Blame and Autonomy in HCI: Testing Perceptions of an AI Agent,” Computers in Human Behavior
• With Nathaniel Ming Curran (ABD), “Artificial Intelligence, Artists, and Art: Attitudes Toward Artwork Produced by Humans vs. AI,”  ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications  

Miles Hubble (Second Year)

• Book review, The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century by Susan Zieger, International Journal of Communication

Perry B. Johnson (ABD)

• With Courtney M. Cox (PhD 2019), presented “Superbowling” for Change: The Acoustic Territory of the Super Bowl Halftime Show” at ICA 2019
• With Courtney M. Cox (PhD 2019) presented “I Said No to the Super Bowl”: The Politics of Performance and Refusal in Super Bowl Halftime Shows, 1991-2018 at the Cultural Studies Association conference
• Moderated the Music is Live panel at the USC OWN It Women's Leadership Summit

Edward B. Kang (Second Year)

• Book review of The Internet of Things by Mercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle, International Journal of Communication
• Presented “The Resume of Flesh: Performances of Excess and Subtlety in South Korea’s Hyper-Competitive Society” at the Cultural Studies Association conference

Do Own Donna Kim (Fourth Year)

• With Associate Professor Dmitri Williams, “Third Places in the Ether Around Us: Layers on the Real World,” In Dolly, J. & Pascoe, C., Rethinking Third Places: Informal Public Spaces and Community Building.
• With Andrea Alarcon (Fourth Year) and Jeeyun Sophia Baik (Fourth Year) presented ""Everyone deserves a smartphone?" Understanding the media's legitimation of mobile technology use by Syrian refugees" at ICA 2019
• With Nathaniel Ming Curran (ABD) and Hyun Tae Calvin Kim (ABD) presented “Appropriation, Conflation, and Othering: A Thematic Analysis of South Korean Twitter Discourse on the Jeju Yemeni Refugees” at ICA 2019 (Ethnicity and Race in Communication division)
• Presented “Audiences as Editors: Transnational Spreadable Media and YouTube Mukbang (Eating Videos)” at the 8th Korean Screen Cultures Conference in Preston, England
• Received a 2019 summer field grant from the USC Korean Studies Institute for her project “Mapping invisible visibility: The impact of gay dating apps on physical gay places and networks in Seoul”

Hyun Tae Calvin Kim (ABD)

• Participated in the Southern California fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) Workshop held at UC Irvine
• With Jeeyun Sophia Baik (Fourth Year), Nathaniel Ming Curran (ABD), Associate Professor Patricia Riley, and Professor Tom Hollihan, presented “Outside Looking In? A Qualitative Analysis of Pro-North Korean Blogspace” at the ICA 2019 North Korea Media pre-conference
• With Nathaniel Ming Curran (ABD), Jeeyun Sophia Baik (Fourth Year), Professor Tom Hollihan, and Associate Professor Patricia Riley presented “North Korean Social Media Diplomacy on Threat and Risk: From Rocket Man to the Red Carpet” at ICA 2019 (Public Diplomacy division)
• With Nathaniel Ming Curran (ABD) and Do Own Donna Kim (Fourth Year) presented “Appropriation, Conflation, and Othering: A Thematic Analysis of South Korean Twitter Discourse on the Jeju Yemeni Refugees” at ICA 2019 (Ethnicity and Race in Communication division)

Jillian Kwong (ABD)

• Selected to attend the 2019 Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme at the University of Oxford

Lauren Levitt (ABD)

• Presented “Sex Workers’ Support Networks: Emotional Care” at Who Cares? Lewis and Clark's 38th Annual Gender Studies Symposium in Portland
• Presented “Moving from Self Care to Communal Care: Sex Workers’ Support Networks” at Interrogating Self-Care: Bodies, Personhood, and Movements in Tumultuous Times at MIT
• Her short film, “Confetti," was an official selection at the 2019 San Francisco Bay Area Sex Worker Film and Arts Festival’s Cyberscreening.
• Attended the USC-UPenn Annenberg Summer Doctoral Institute on Difference in Media and Culture where she presented her paper, “Sex Workers’ Caring Practices: Physical Care”

Yiqi Li (Fourth Year)

• Presented “The Stitching Forces of Online Multi-Issue Social Movements” at the Sunbelt Social Networks Conference in Montreal

Marina Litvinsky (ABD)

• With Matthew Le Bui (ABD) and Andrea Wenzel (PhD 2017) presented as part of a panel on “Communicating in the City, Communication about the City” at the 2019 Urban Affairs Association Conference

Rogelio Alejandro Lopez (ABD)

• With Professor Henry Jenkins, "On Emma Gonzalez's Jacket and Other Media: The Participatory Politics of the #NeverAgain Movement," Brown Journal of World Affairs

Junyi Lv (Second Year)

• With Stuart Cunningham and Clinical Associate Professor David Craig, “China’s Livestreaming Industry: Platforms, Politics, and Precarity,” International Journal of Cultural Studies

Joan Joda Miller (Fifth Year)

• Presented “Health as an Interspecies System: Connecting with Our Best Friends” at the NASPA Strategies Conference for Wellness and Health Promotion Leadership

Rachel Moran (ABD)

• With Matthew Le Bui (ABD), “Race, ethnicity, and telecommunications policy issues of access and representation: Centering communities of color and their concerns,” Telecommunications Policy

Hoan Nguyen (Second Year)

• Book review, Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, and Arely M. Zimmerman, By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, International Journal of Communication
• Presented “Digital Marginality in the City: Technology Access and Use Among People Experiencing Homelessness in Los Angeles” at the International Association of Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) conference
• Presented “Against Discrimination: Strategic Use of Technology Amongst Homeless Women in Los Angeles” also at IAMCR

Clare O’Connor (ABD)

• Presented "Splitting the Atom of Creative Worship: Hillsong Church and the Neoliberal Creative Worship Economy" at ICA 2019
• Presented "On Citing Performatives: Invoking the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike Today" at the Cultural Studies Association conference

Ashley Phelps (Second Year)

• With Daria Griffith (Second Year), presented “Unread Emails Cannot Heal Wounds: University Crisis Response After Breach of Trust” at ICA 2019

Ruqin Ren (ABD)

• Presented “The Evolution of Knowledge Creation Online: Examining Wikipedia as a Dynamic System” at the Sunbelt Social Networks Conference in Montreal

Cerianne Robertson (Second Year)

• “Where do LA Times staffers go after they leave the paper? We found out,” Columbia Journalism Review

Amber Lynn Scott (Second Year)

• Presented “Flying Off the Handle: Difficult Conversations Between U.S. Navy Flight Surgeons and U.S. Navy Pilots” at the 2019 ICA Difficult Conversations in Healthcare preconference

Sonia Jawaid Shaikh (ABD)

• Received a Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant, which provides funding for expenses related to dissertation completion

Lauren Sowa (Fourth Year)

• Presented “Breaking stereotypes or stereotypical breakdowns?: Analyzing television casting breakdowns for Latina Characters” at ICA 2019 (Ethnicity & Race Division)
• Presented “ From gendered products to gender politics: How beauty-vloggers turned UN change ambassadors engage intersectionally” at ICA 2019 (Feminist Scholarship Division)
• Presented “Do you hear the people rap?: Broadway’s broadening of the public sphere through Les Miserables and Hamilton” at ICA 2019 (Visual Studies Division)
• Presented “A dream is a wish your brain manifests into reality: A comparative analysis of Disney princess’ autonomy and the Dream Big, Princess campaign” at the Pop Culture Conference at DePaul University in Chicago

Jingyi Sun (Fourth Year)

• Presented “NGOs’ Agenda Building on Twitter in the Refugee Crisis: An Inter-organizational Network Approach” at the Sunbelt Social Networks Conference in Montreal

Grace Yuehan Wang (ABD)

• Book review, Seek the Alternatives: Another Economy is Possible, Global Media and Communication
• Presented “Innovation and Startups Rising in Asia” at the Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast Conference (ASPAC)
• Presented “Shenzhen, the Innovation City in Form” at the Western Social Science Association Conference
• Presented “From Silicon Valley to Silicon Delta: A Case Study of Shenzhen in its 40th Year Anniversary of Open Reform Policy” to the Chinese Communication Association and at ICA 2019
• Hosted and organized the first Fast Track Selection 2019 Global Industrial Internet Pitch Event in Los Angeles

Liyuan Leah Wang (ABD)

• With Professor Lynn Miller, David Jeong (PhD 2017), and Traci Gillig (PhD 2019), Bringing the “Real World” into the Experimental Lab: Technology-enabling Transformative Designs.  In P. Davis, A. O’Mahony, & J. Pfautz (Eds.) Social Behavioral Science Modeling.

Yu Xu (PhD 2019)

• With Professors Janet Fulk and Peter Monge, presented “Ecological Influences on Tie Dissolution in the Evolution of Affiliation Networks in an Academic Organization” at ICA 2019

Sulafa Zidani (ABD)

• “Pride of the Arabs: Mo, Morality, and Memes,” Mada Masr
• Presented “From the Internet, This is the Radio: Desynchronizing Time & Space to Express Solidarity” at South by Southeast, the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARCG) fellows biennial conference on Popular Culture and Coloniality: Decolonizing Global Media and Communication, UPenn
• Presented her book chapter, co-authored with Yomna Elsayed (PhD 2018), “Reimagining the Arab Spring: From Limitation to Creativity,” at the Media in Transition Conference at MIT
• Presented “Say It Again – Language and Power in Internet Memes” at the ICA 2019 Preconference: Crossing Boundaries in Visual Communication Research.