Several Internet Governance Lab scholars presented their research and were recognized with awards at the prestigious 68th Annual International Communication Association (ICA) Conference (#ICA18) in Prague, Czech Republic from May 24-28, 2018.
Lab Scholar and AU School of Communication (SOC) PhD student Erica Diya Basu won the Third Top Student Paper Award for her paper Public Diplomacy’s Digital Turn, a qualitative case study of the U.S. Embassy India’s 2015 digital diplomacy campaign on climate change. In addition, SOC Professor Rhonda Zaharna was awarded Top Reviewer and won Second Top Faculty Paper Award at the conference. These awards were presented by the ICA Public Diplomacy Interest Group.
Lab Faculty Fellows and SOC professors Patricia Aufderheide and Aram Sinnreich both presented at several panels throughout the conference, including their co-authored paper Copyright Givers and Takers: Mutuality, Altruism and Instrumentalism in Open Licensing as part of the panel “The Struggle Over Copyright and Intellectual Property.” SOC University Professor Dr. Aufderheide also presented her co-authored paper Calculating the Consequences of Australian Copyright Exceptions: Measurable, Hidden, and Incalculable Costs to Creators on this same panel.
In addition, Dr. Aufderheide and Dr. Sinnreich presented their respective papers as part of the panel “Weaponized IP: Using Monopoly Privilege to Raise and Silence Voices.” Their papers were entitled Testing the Claims of Multistakeholder Governance in ICANN: Trademark Overreach in the New gTLDs and Copyright as Censorship: Capturing Political Bias in the Use of DMCA Takedown Provisions, respectively. Furthermore, Dr. Aufderheide chaired the session “Labor Studies in the Digital Media Economy”; participated in the paper session “Copyright and Fair Use in Communications Research: The State of the Field”; and co-presented the paper U.S. Public Broadcasting Under Political Threat: Analysis of Independent Television Service’s Independent Documentaries, 2007-2016 – co-authored with SOC professors Caty Borum Chattoo (first author), Michele Alexander, and Chandler Green – on the panel “Media Institutions and Content: Studies of Traditional and Emerging Forms.” The article U.S. Public Broadcasting Under Political Threat was recently published in the International Journal of Communication.
Meanwhile, Dr. Sinnreich chaired the panel “Studying Scenes and Markets: Popular Music in Time and Space,” and presented the paper Tweet the Press: Fake News as a Reputation-Management Device in President Trump’s Tweets, which was co-authored with SOC Professor Dorian Davis and presented on the panel “Journalism Under Attack.”
Furthermore, SOC professor Borum Chattoo's paper Comedy and Social Change: The Effects of Satire and News on Persuasion about Syrian Refugees, co-authored with Dr. Lauren Feldman of Rutgers University, was presented at the "Issues in Political Communication" session of the conference.
The International Communication Association (ISA) was founded over 50 years ago as an academic association for scholars interested in the study, teaching, and application of all aspects of human and mediated communication. It is now an international association with more than 4,500 members in 80 countries.