Research

Materials girls: New exhibit highlights the role women are playing in reimagining built environments

Joe Arney — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 18:37:21 +0000

Materials girls: New exhibit highlights the role women are playing in reimagining built environments Joe Arney Thu, 08/28/2025 - 12:37

Sharon Waters

‘The accelerating realities of climate change demand that we reconsider our built environments, our landscapes and our material practices,’ says Caitlin Charlet, who is curating an exhibit on biogenic building materials this fall. Photo by Kimberly Coffin.

Caitlin Charlet never uses the word “sustainability.”

“Anything can be called sustainable,” said Charlet, associate teaching professor in CMDI’s environmental design department. “Like any overused language, it loses meaning.”

That’s why her upcoming exhibit avoids the term altogether. Biogenic Futures: Women Shaping Material Ecologies, which runs Sept. 4 through Jan. 5 at the ��, was curated by Charlet and presents new directions in materials design and research.

If you go

What: Biogenic Futures: Women Shaping Material Ecologies

When: Sept. 4 through Jan. 5. An opening reception is planned for 4 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 4.

Where: CU Art Museum, 1085 18th St., Boulder

Who: The exhibit is curated by Caitlin Charlet, an associate teaching professor, and two student researchers, seniors Kaija Galins and Brielle French.

Learn more

Biogenics refers to timber, mycelium, algaes and other regenerative materials—locally sourced, plant- or soil-based substances that are redefining the future of construction. The exhibit features work from nearly 50 female innovators worldwide, along with samples from ��’s materials library.

“We have extracted from the earth to exhaustion, damaging landscapes and communities,” Charlet said. “But there is so much to reclaim. Healthy building isn’t just about new materials—it’s about reusing, reimagining and building holistically.”

The exhibition assembles samples from the research and practice of nearly 50 women, supplemented by contributions from ��’s materials library. By centering women, Charlet seeks to highlight the quiet revolution within materials science over the past decade—one that diverges from the historically male-dominated spheres of engineering and architecture.

“Materials science is collaborative, tactile and iterative. Experimentation requires repetition, and failure is often the condition for discovery,” she said. “Many women have cultivated laboratories in relative obscurity, conducting extraordinary research into construction and design alternatives that do not inflict harm—on us, or on the planet.”

Her aspiration is for visitors to recognize how profoundly material choices shape lived experience, and to reconsider their own role in those choices.

“The exhibition invites touch and engagement,” Charlet said. “Visitors will encounter biogenic materials firsthand, learning not only about their current applications but also about the ways they are being developed for the future.”

Bringing community perspectives to class

Charlet, who is also head of ��’s Biomodernity Lab, considers herself an educator, urbanist, designer and advocate. She started her career as a visual artist before moving into design architecture.

“As a designer, I learn alongside communities—working with them, not merely in them—and I bring those lessons to my students,” said Charlet, who holds dual master’s degrees in architecture and design and urban ecology from Parsons’ School of Constructed Environments at The New School. “Designers must be prepared to adapt, to function as Swiss Army knives—ready to respond to the complexities of place, project and community.”

Her commitment to biomaterials deepened during graduate study, while living with her young family in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood. Observing widespread asthma, allergies, and sensitivities among local children—including her own—Charlet began examining not only external pollutants from the Superfund site and nearby expressway, but also the hidden toxins within domestic interiors: paint, drywall, upholstery and flooring.

That work helped her realize the potential of regenerative materials to safeguard both human and planetary health.

“Everyone deserves to understand the environments they inhabit, because health, community and ecology are inseparable,” Charlet said. “The accelerating realities of climate change demand that we reconsider our built environments, our landscapes and our material practices—and imagine new, restorative ways forward.”

A materials science expert will showcase the use of regenerative materials in building designs to improve health and limit environmental damage.

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Over a Barrel: The branding misfire that put a restaurant chain in the crosshairs

Joe Arney — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 19:18:51 +0000

Over a Barrel: The branding misfire that put a restaurant chain in the crosshairs Joe Arney Wed, 08/27/2025 - 13:18

Joe Arney

Morgan Young says Cracker Barrel’s rebranding about-face reminded him of Coca-Cola in the 1980s. ‘The issue with New Coke wasn’t the flavor, it was doing away with an iconic brand that meant so much to people,’ he says. Photo by Kimberly Coffin.

One week after Cracker Barrel unveiled a new logo—part of a reported $700 million investment into updates for the restaurant chain—the company announced it will revert back to its old branding.

And while the political overtones that drove such an intensive backlash against the company are a more contemporary feature of our culture, Morgan Young said the brand likely made the same error Coca-Cola committed in a short-lived rebrand in the 1980s.

“I’m sure Cracker Barrel did the research, ran focus groups and asked good questions—one of them being, do you like this logo better?” said Young, an associate teaching professor of advertising at the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information. “What Coca-Cola didn’t do, and perhaps Cracker Barrel didn’t do, as well, was ask the next question, which would be, ‘How do you feel about the brand as an identity to you?’ Because the issue with New Coke wasn’t the flavor, it was doing away with an iconic brand that meant so much to people.”

“We are in a moment of rapid innovation, and if you are older, change is not necessarily a good thing—because it can mean being left behind. And I think that’s what’s happening here.”

Morgan Young, associate teaching professor, APRD

Young (Hist’94) has never worked on the Cracker Barrel brand, but has decades of experience, both in running his own agency, Young Ideas, and as a former senior vice president and creative director at Goddard Claussen. So, he has a keen eye for what happens when a brand misses the mark.

In trying to grow its customer base, Cracker Barrel alienated its dedicated fans by not only drastically simplifying the logo, but changing the look and feel of some of its restaurants to get away from its farmhouse aesthetic.

“Cracker Barrel likely didn’t understand that their fanbase—likely an older group of customers—doesn’t want a change,” Young said. “We are in a moment of rapid innovation, and if you are older, change is not necessarily a good thing—because it can mean being left behind. And I think that’s what’s happening here.”

In the undergraduate classes he teaches, Young asks his students what their most admired brands are. In each class, Nike and Patagonia top the list, and it’s not because of the clothes they sell.

“They feel Nike has a set of values they stand by. Same with Patagonia, which calls itself an environment-first company,” Young said. “I think in 2025, you can’t hide from your values as a company. Nike and Patagonia have built a devoted fanbase by leaning into those values, which inspires loyalty among customers and help them grow.”

So, in a hyperpolarized moment—when a new logo sets off a political firestorm that even the president of the country feels inclined to weigh in on—what is the lesson for advertising and branding professionals? Young shared some thoughts he brings to the classroom:

Don’t be afraid to take chances. “If you’re always in the backseat, waiting for someone else to lead, you’ll always be Pepsi,” Young said. “In my agency days, we were always about change, trying to help brands stay with the times. That’s how you succeed.”
Know your audience. You can’t sell to everyone—and when you try, you invite backlash like Cracker Barrel is going through, or like Bud Lite a couple years back. “Think about your target audience and how to communicate with them effectively, and bond with them,” he said.
Question yourself. Young had several campaigns he was quite proud of die in focus groups. “When I would do anything that harkened back to the past, we would have focus group members—especially with Black audiences, and especially women—say, ‘Those 1950s Americana themes might look good to you, but they bring up bad feelings for me. You have a different history than I do,’” Young said. “And they were right.”

Ultimately, the swirling controversy around Cracker Barrel’s re-rebrand is unlikely to cost the chain in the long term, Young said. But it is a reminder—especially in the digital age, where social media can both burnish and tarnish a brand’s bona fides—that companies have less control than ever over their value and meaning.

“We don’t determine a brand—the consumer does,” Young said. “Just ask Cracker Barrel.”

Joe Arney covers research and general news for the college.

An advertising and branding expert weighs in on Cracker Barrel's rebrand and reversal.

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A positive influence

Joe Arney — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 21:22:31 +0000

A positive influence Joe Arney Tue, 08/12/2025 - 15:22

Sharon Waters

Few people think about disability until it happens to them or someone they love. Now, a new book by an expert in health communication is challenging scholars to rethink how they consider disability in their own research work.

“Really being aware of disability, and asking about it and learning about it—that’s what we're trying to do with this book,” said Erin Willis, an associate professor in the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Design at ��’s College of Communication, Media, Design and Information. “How are you experiencing it in your life? Who do you encounter? Do you see it on TV?”

Those are fundamental questions that scholars have long ignored—and she puts herself in that category, as well. Willis is an expert in online health communities who has done pathbreaking work in the study of patient influencers, who amass a following by sharing their lived experiences with medical conditions.

But though she’s been interested in health communication since graduate school, “I haven’t come across this idea of disability,” she said. “It’s not something we think about on a day-to-day basis.”

That led her to the new book she co-edited, Communicating Disability: Expanding Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Health Communication and Mass Media.

Health communication has traditionally focused on health disparities or health equity, with an emphasis on how to change patient behaviors. Willis wants to bring disabled people into the conversation—“not just in a way that we’re trying to fix or prevent the ailment, but that really includes them in the community,” she said.

One chapter of the book that Willis co-authored looks at two models of disability, and how they impact health communication. The medical model focuses on patients, and fixing what is wrong: the ailment or disease.

“When you think about disability in the medical model, you can never be fixed. Your disability might be permanent, and so therefore, something is always wrong with you,” she said. The social model, meanwhile, encompasses the environment and stigma that limit accessibility—literally and figuratively—and calls for structural change to foster inclusion.

Overcoming shame, isolation

Another chapter Willis edited is close to her influencer work, and dives into how online amplification of disabled peoples’ experiences erases stigma.

“Social media have given opportunities to a niche group to really be seen, whereas traditional media might have overlooked them,” Willis said.

Take ostomy, for example, a surgery that creates a new opening for urine or poop to exit into a pouch outside the body. Grassroots efforts to discuss the condition on TikTok and Instagram have helped people with ostomy overcome the shame and social isolation they may feel.

That means people with disabilities no longer have to rely on mainstream media outlets to define their issues or the challenges they face in doing their work.

“Social media have given opportunities to a niche group to really be seen, whereas traditional media might have overlooked them.”

Erin Willis, associate professor, APRD

“Social media has really opened the doors to find each other,” Willis said. “This really fills a gap where all these people did not have this peer support before. It’s all these small things that make a difference.”

Willis is doing further research into disability influencers, some of whom have millions of followers on social media and are reaching far beyond people with the same condition.

“It's an emotional connection. Some kind of curiosity is being stemmed,” she said.

Willis co-edited the book with Chad Painter, an associate professor of communication at the University of Dayton. Some of the book’s authors are disabled—including Willis, who has had severe rheumatoid arthritis since she was 2.

“I do have a disability,” she said. “Despite me saying that, I have never identified as having a disability. This book has really made me think about myself and how I identify with disability—and what that means, even.”

A new textbook edited by a CMDI professor aims to show how scholars can think about disability in their own research.

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Research awards highlight CMDI’s focus on how art, humanities can empower progress

Joe Arney — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 15:40:00 +0000

Research awards highlight CMDI’s focus on how art, humanities can empower progress Joe Arney Fri, 07/18/2025 - 09:40

Joe Arney

Can art bridge the increasingly precarious divide between Americans?

If so, Teri Rueb said, it’s not likely to be something you see in a gallery or a museum. It’s one reason her canvas is typically a landscape that invites people using a particular space to slow down and be moved by the sound she introduces into particular places.

“When we talk about other people from other parts of the country, it seems we don’t even start from a place of basic humility—like respect for how you live, or what your culture is, or the history of where you live,” said Rueb, a professor of critical media practices at ��’s College of Communication, Media, Design and Information.

Rueb is one of six CMDI professors to win Arts and Humanities grants through the university’s Research and Innovation Office. It’s an impressive feat, with CMDI faculty claiming one-quarter of the 20 grants awarded this year; four of the college’s seven academic departments were recognized with funding.

The CMDI faculty recognized with grants are:

Steven Frost, assistant professor, media studies. Threads of Resistance: Sampling Labor Histories Through the Lowell Mill Textile Archives.
Zannah Matson, assistant professor, environmental design. Mine-o-Polis: A Board Game About Mining and Extractive Capital.
Hillary Rosner, assistant teaching professor, journalism. Studies in Nature: Lichen.
Shawhin Roudbari, associate professor; Sophie Weston Chien, chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow, environmental design. Dark Papers: Advancing Forms of Design Justice Discourse.
Rueb, professor of critical media practices. Confluences: Mobile App-Based Site-Specific Soundwalk and Website Archive.

“We’re not trying to replace the peer-reviewed journal. Instead, we’re asking, what are the conversations you need for a journal article?”

Sophie Weston Chien, chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow, environmental design

The Dark Papers project is an initiative of Dark Matter U, a collective of educators, researchers and thinkers that’s critically re-examining design education and practice to be more inclusive.

“Dark papers are really just short, quick, urgent conversations—almost research seedlings,” Chien said. “It is both a record in time and a way to connect and expand dialogues that are happening.”

There is a strong activist strain to this work, which is designed to bring an antiracist perspective to problems in design and architecture. It aims to do so by bringing more voices to the table, including some who have been excluded or underrepresented in academia.

“Dark papers fit in a larger ecosystem of the college, where we have faculty and students doing interesting work in things like extraction, or disability justice,” Roudbari said. “And a bunch of them also do creative dissemination models to raise awareness of these issues.”

The grant will help Dark Matter U complete some badly needed blocking and tackling, like making its website accessible and paying for transcription services. But the project is already getting attention in the professional world, including a takeover of Architect Magazine that examined topics like design justice and how to transform professional practice.

“We’re not trying to replace the peer-reviewed journal,” Chien said. “Instead, we’re asking, what are the conversations you need for a journal article? And how can those conversations be their own kind of instigator to move these ideas forward?”

Rueb’s project, Confluences, is a site-specific sound experience already installed at Ucross, which hosts artists in residency at its Wyoming location, situated amid working ranches. The region is unique—it’s been shaped by agriculture and resource extraction, but is close to arts communities and, of course, Ucross itself. Visitors to the campus who download a free mobile app can hear voices from the community—local ranchers, past artists and field recordings—as they wander the landscape.

The sense of connection in Confluences isn’t just about the land visitors can see, but its original inhabitants. During the course of the project, she worked with Native historians, ethnobotanists and astronomers to better incorporate the narratives of Indigenous people in her art.

Confluences, which Rueb created alongside interdisciplinary artist Laurids Sonne, soft launched earlier this year, and is scheduled to formally debut in August.

“The project has this opportunity to bring people from very different walks of life together, and maybe make the rural-urban dichotomy become more porous,” Rueb said. “There’s simply not enough unscripted, unaffiliated, nonpartisan public space for debate and dialogue at this moment. If we can change that in the tiniest measure, giving amplification to the diversity of walks of life that make up our country, maybe that would help mend some old wounds, and find new ground for conversations.”

Of the 20 projects to earn RIO grants, five are led by faculty from the college.

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A visitor to Ucross uses a smartphone to experience Confluences, a site-specific sound experience in Wyoming. Photo courtesy Ucross Foundation.

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A visitor to Ucross uses a smartphone to experience Confluences, a site-specific sound experience in Wyoming. Photo courtesy Ucross Foundation.

The roads net taken

Amanda J. McManus — Wed, 28 May 2025 20:10:55 +0000

The roads net taken Amanda J. McManus Wed, 05/28/2025 - 14:10

By Joe Arney
Photos by Kimberly Coffin (CritMedia, StratComm’18)

Robert Frost once wrote of two roads diverging in a yellow wood, and imagining his narrator eventually regretting whichever choice he made.

“I want to introduce a sense of wonder and marvel about what has happened—and what could still be possible.

Lori Emerson
Associate Professor
Media Studies

Lori Emerson is also fascinated by the road not taken. But unlike Frost, who is looking forward down those roads, she is looking backward, to the technology-related choices—around networks, protocols and structures—that led us to this moment.

And, especially, what we can learn from the choices we didn’t make along the way.

It’s something Emerson, an associate chair of media studies at ��’s College of Media, Communication and Information, explores at length in Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, which she published last month.

“I want to introduce a sense of wonder and marvel about what has happened—and what could still be possible,” Emerson said.

It can be difficult to imagine what something like the internet might look like in an alternate timeline. But in fact, just calling it “the internet” makes it feel like the preordained platform that we were inevitably going to get.

“The internet is just a network of networks,” she said. “There are other networks of networks, and there could be others in the future. What bothers me is this unquestioned narrative about the internet as this singular endpoint—that it only could have been created in the U.S. in the way in which it currently exists.”

A quiet activist

There is a quiet strain of activism in Emerson’s work that’s getting a little louder: She’s trying to be more outspoken at a time when technology is increasingly consolidated in the hands of a few major players.

“The future feels predetermined and has left most people feeling like they have no power to intervene, and we all just have to accept things as they are,” she said. “And so what I’m trying to do is poke holes in that ideology with very simple, compelling examples from the past.”

Simple and compelling are rarely adjectives used to describe an academic publication, but Emerson leaned on her background in experimental poetry and poetics to break a few boundaries. The result is a beautifully designed book that wouldn’t seem out of place among the vintage instruction manuals created for telephones and telegraphs from generations ago.

“Women played a huge role in the creation, adoption and maintenance of networks, from the telephone to the radio, but have been erased in favor of individual white guy inventors,” she said. “I wanted to create an alternate universe in a book that echoed that history you see in those cloth, hardcover, gold-foiled instruction books—but in a way that was feminized.”

Her book isn’t the only public-facing space where Emerson offers critical thinking around technology. CMCI’s Media Archaeology Lab started as a way for Emerson, the lab’s director, to collect Apple IIe computers in order to run an experimental kinetic digital poem in class. It has evolved to become an extremely thorough repository of obsolete, but still functioning, technology, from Ataris to Zip drives.

“The more we gathered, the more I became convinced that hands-on access to historical technology is essential to understand how it actually works,” she said. “You have to be able to use it, to take it apart. By doing so, you come to appreciate how we got to the point where these technologies were created, and imagine alternative presents and futures.”

New book, old story

The book is new, but the story of technology as a linear narrative isn’t. Beyond the lab, Emerson’s work has gone as far back as how rural communities created the party-line phone system by tapping the miles of barbed-wire fence spanning their properties. That kind of alternate network—one Ma Bell didn’t control—is something she wants readers to think about while questioning the narrative Silicon Valley has put forth as the internet’s origin story.

It’s almost a book that didn’t happen. Emerson was well past her deadline before realizing she had to narrow how deep her focus would go; “a full accounting of all the networks out there would never get finished,” she said.

As it was, the manuscript tripped some wires in China—censors objected to a part discussing how activists in the Tiananmen Square massacre used faxes to communicate with one another—which meant printing had to be moved to Turkey. As the materials arrived for printing, a once-in-a-lifetime snowstorm struck, delaying production by almost a month.

Finally, her publisher declared it was going out of business after the first run of books was printed. A limited run is available, and Emerson plans to get it to a new publisher once the existing copies have sold.

“The whole thing has been one surprise after another, honestly,” Emerson said. “When you think about Chinese censorship—of course it happens, but to actually have it happen to you is something else altogether.”

She hopes readers appreciate the look and feel of her text, while maybe finding in it a reason to be hopeful about technology by re-examining its past.

“I hope people take from it a different sense of the history, and feel excited and empowered, rather than just absorbing the dominant narrative about how everything is terrible,” Emerson said.

Lori Emerson’s research work examines forks in the road where networks and technology diverged. Her new book argues technology as we know it isn’t inevitable—and should be open to reexamination.

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CMCI names its first endowed professor

Amanda J. McManus — Wed, 28 May 2025 18:24:06 +0000

CMCI names its first endowed professor Amanda J. McManus Wed, 05/28/2025 - 12:24

By Joe Arney
Photos by Kimberly Coffin (CritMedia, StratComm’18)

She’s done pathbreaking research in technology ethics and internet law, has been featured in The Washington Post and NPR, and does extensive public scholarship as an outspoken expert on social media.

So, it’s no surprise that when it came to naming its first endowed professorship, the College of Media, Communication and Information turned to Casey Fiesler.

“When we created CMCI, we were energized by the vision of a college where we would study and teach not just a set of related disciplines, but the areas where those disciplines come together,” said Lori Bergen, CMCI founding dean. “Casey is a model for that. Her ethical and legal perspectives on important questions surrounding technology help us make sense of complex problems. And she is able to break down those complicated problems in ways that help the public ask more thoughtful questions about the platforms and tools they use each day.”

More: Building a better ‘bionic pancreas’

In July, Fiesler, an associate professor of information science at CMCI, will be named the William R. Payden Endowed Professor. The honor recognizes the demonstrated, sustained national reputation she has brought to her discipline, and comes with an annual research budget to continue her important work in social media platforms and online communities, education, and generative A.I.—especially from an ethics standpoint.

“She is able to break down those complicated problems in ways that help the public ask more thoughtful questions about the platforms and tools they use each day.”

Lori Bergen, founding dean

In fact, she’s created a public syllabus—consisting of her social media videos and select texts and other websites—to help others start thinking about the ethics of A.I. It’s still in beta, so to speak, but has attracted attention, including from teachers searching for relatable, approachable perspectives on these complex issues.

“Considering how much admiration and respect I have for everyone in the college, I’m beyond honored to be recognized,” Fiesler said.

The position comes with a small stipend, which Fiesler was interested in using to attract well-known speakers for guest talks—to expose students to great researchers—and to be able to pay student researchers for their contributions to her work, such as a grant-funded pilot project to create educational content on A.I. that’s delivered over social media.

“If that goes well, I’d like to be able to keep it going beyond the grant,” she said. “And if we were to do so, it would be important to make sure we’re fairly compensating our students for the work they do.”

Fiesler said she also attributes the successes of her research to collaborative work, particularly with the graduate students she’s worked with at the college. One of her former students, Shamika Klassen (PhDInfoSci’24), said having Fiesler for an advisor during her doctoral work “was like having a celebrity for a parent.”

“When I mention her name, people would say, ‘Oh, Professor Casey on TikTok,’ or ‘I watched her videos on YouTube when I was applying to graduate school,” said Klassen, now a user experience researcher at Google. “Casey is a testament to what public scholarship can be, in addition to being an incredible advisor and advocate of me and my work.”

More: Questions about A.I.? Let’s Chat

The endowed professorship was made possible through a donation from Joan Payden, a co-founder of the Payden & Rygel investment management firm, in memory of her brother, William Payden (Jour’57). Bill Payden was known for his curiosity, as he was a journalist, college professor, sports fan, cinephile, pianist, world traveler, and collector of aviation memorabilia and classic cars.

The family also created the Payden Faculty Excellence Award, which recognizes excellence in teaching and research or creative work, and the Payden Teaching Excellence Grants, which are awarded to faculty to support innovative teaching endeavors, such as new interdisciplinary courses, revamped classes that support enhanced student engagement, or to purchase resources or training to improve teaching and the student experience.

Casey Fiesler, whose perspectives on law and ethics in technology have given her national cachet, has been named the William R. Payden Endowed Professor at the college.

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Courting justice

Amanda J. McManus — Wed, 28 May 2025 17:49:03 +0000

Courting justice Amanda J. McManus Wed, 05/28/2025 - 11:49

By Joe Arney
Photos by Kimberly Coffin (CritMedia, StratComm’18) and Nandi Pointer (PhD candidate, Media Studies)

Ask any of her students how they prefer to get their news, or search for recommendations, or learn about their favorite TV shows, and Sandra Ristovska will tell you that they go on TikTok.

Yet their educations—from the time they first set foot in a grammar school classroom—have focused on textual literacy, with almost nothing devoted to how video and photos are analyzed.

“We just assume that everybody intuitively knows how to understand images, because we don’t have to teach you an alphabet, or grammar,” said Ristovska, associate professor of media studies at the College of Media, Communication and Information. “But we know from research that people can watch the same image and arrive at a vastly different understanding about what that image says or does.”

More: Bringing student activism to TikTok videos

That’s fun when we’re overanalyzing a plot twist in Severance. But Ristovska’s work centers around what happens when videos make their way into a courtroom, where interpretations can influence a person’s guilt or innocence.

According to one estimate, video appears in about 80 percent of criminal cases, but no guidelines exist for how video can be presented as evidence in court. And that’s also the case for deepfake videos or media created by generative artificial intelligence.

“Anybody who’s seen a legal document knows they’re standardized—if it doesn’t look a certain way, it’s not going to be admissible in court,” Ristovska said. “But when it comes to video, different courts have different guidelines and understandings about what’s admissible.”

Ristovska has been an important contributor to scholarship in media and the law. At a daylong event in April, she helped steer the conversation around these topics while formally presenting the Visual Evidence Lab, a new lab at CMCI that will advance her work in this area.

The workshop, Justice by Video, brought together judges, attorneys, journalists, and scholars from the humanities, social sciences, law and STEM to develop new avenues for research and potential policy proposals around how to ensure justice is best served.

Ristovska’s personal history plays a role in all this, too. Growing up in what is now Macedonia during the Yugoslav Wars, she still recalls how footage from the fighting upset her parents—even if she was too young to understand the news bulletins interrupting her evening cartoons. As part of her graduate school work, she went on to study how footage from civilians and activists made its way to the United Nations’ criminal tribunal, in The Hague.

“I realized the law was an important place to be asking questions about video evidence,” she said. “Some of the citizen footage in the tribunal wasn’t verified through the person who shot it, which had never been the case before. And this footage was both establishing the truth in court while constructing a historical memory about the wars.”

Cross-disciplinary expertise

Sandra Braman, a professor of media and information at Michigan State University, said she was excited to participate in this event because of the range of expertise involved, including practicing judges as well as legal scholars and researchers from across the social sciences.

Braman has twice served as a visiting professor at CMCI, and is considered among the leading scholars in digital technologies and their policy implications. She was impressed with the agenda, which included small group discussions intended to stimulate cross-disciplinary discussion and a detailed reading list to review beforehand.

“Usually, when you go to the first conference of its kind, it’s just a chance to gather and talk generally about the topic,” Braman said. “Sandra has put together a very structured set of tasks that are actually very hard questions to guide us on visual evidence.”

Roderick Kennedy, who retired from the New Mexico Court of Appeals after serving as its chief judge, was part of an afternoon panel discussing the issues raised by Incident, a documentary of a police shooting in Chicago and the role security footage plays in creating a narrative explaining what happened.

Kennedy and Ristovska met through his work with the American Bar Association. Ristovska presented a series of webinars on video evidence and deepfakes to members. They also collaborated when she was a guest editor of an issue of The SciTech Lawyer last winter that took a deep dive on these issues.

Kennedy said video evidence presents similar challenges that he would see with eyewitness testimony throughout his career. Memory is unreliable, he said, as witnesses become suggestible when asked to remember details or are affected by the pressure to have a definitive answer for investigators.

“You have a single viewpoint, but it’s overlaid with other memories that can change things, and is subject to interpretation every time you recall it and restore it,” he said.

‘A vertical learning curve’

A video won’t change its memory under pressure, but how it’s captured and edited can influence the way a jury interprets what happened. And while footage from police body cams or the smartphones of bystanders may get the most attention, Kennedy said the issue crops up elsewhere—even police interrogations. He shared a case involving a pathologist whose findings in a homicide were influenced by hearing a woman confess to the crime on camera.

Her confession, however, was preceded by an exhausting, seven-hour police interrogation. And because we’ve been conditioned to believe videos show reality—without considering how they were framed, trimmed, slowed down or otherwise edited—they have significant potential to mislead jurors.

“That’s the power of video,” Kennedy said. If you only show a jury the last minute or so of that interrogation, “all you see is a mother saying she killed her baby.”

The workshop wasn’t just about editing techniques that may introduce doubt. Invited experts also discussed deepfakes, an emerging challenge for courts that must catch up to the technology. Kennedy said judges and lawyers “have almost a vertical learning curve” when it comes to the technology.

“You have to learn the language of the technology experts before you can accuse somebody of using a deepfake,” he said. “And the experts aren’t taught how to speak legal, or the legal rules for putting their expertise in evidence.”

One thread of Braman’s research on information policy is the history of facts themselves.

“Our social orientation around facts provides the context within which we think about evidence,” she said. “And though we are talking a lot today about A.I. and the problem of deepfakes, the question of the authenticity and validity of digital information in general actually first arose as soon as the internet became available to the general public. We need to solve this problem yesterday.”

Ristovska said she was pleased to see members of the public attend to watch Incident and start thinking about video as a communication tool that is overdue for guidance.

“We’re not going to solve all the challenges around how people see video—we can’t do that with any type of evidence,” she said. “But I hope we can develop research-based guidelines that promote consistency, fairness and equality in the use of video as evidence.”

Video evidence appears in 80 percent of criminal cases, but a lack of consistent guidelines means there’s no standard for how media are presented in court. A workshop led by CMCI faculty may change that.

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Trial by fire

Joe Arney — Tue, 20 May 2025 16:39:56 +0000

Trial by fire Joe Arney Tue, 05/20/2025 - 10:39

Anna Turner was one of 10 finalists in the annual Three-Minute Thesis hosted by the Graduate School. Her PhD journey was marked by trials, including losing almost all her work in a house fire halfway through the program.

By Joe Arney
Photos by Hannah Howell (media production)

The PhD student’s journey is about learning—not just about the subject that most interests them, but about themselves, and whether they possess the mettle to overcome the rigors of research and teaching.

Part of Anna Turner’s struggle was finding a program that would encourage her to explore her dual interests in the quantitative and critical approaches to media studies.

But the real challenge came halfway in, when she lost virtually all of her work in a fire.

“I knew it was going to take me longer than most students to finish the program, because my dissertation is a little ambitious,” said Turner (PhDMediaSt’25), who graduated from the College of Media, Communication and Information at �� in May. “But basically, I lost my fourth and fifth year rebuilding everything.”

Turner was staying with her boyfriend over spring break when another unit in the building caught fire. They fled with their pets; while the unit itself didn’t burn, water from the fire hoses damaged the technology that was left behind.

And while her work was backed up to a cloud drive, that was also lost when she turned in a borrowed computer two months after the fire. A technician accidentally deleted the cloud backup, instead of just wiping her local profile from the machine.

“The experience taught me how resilient I am,” she said. “Because every time I tell the story to another PhD, they’re like, ‘Wow, I would have quit.’”

More assignments for a top teacher

Turner credited CMCI and its media studies department with supporting her through the worst, including finding teaching assignments and other opportunities to fund her journey. The extra teaching duties benefited both Turner and the college, said Rick Stevens, then the chair of the media studies department.

“CU was one of the few places that didn’t try to change me. Everything I had imagined about Colorado came to fruition when I visited—it was everything I wanted, academically and socially.”

Anna Turner (PhDMediaSt’25)

“Anna never seems to get flustered, no matter what is thrown at her,” said Stevens, now associate dean of undergraduate education at CMCI. “She always finds a way to not just come through, but come through in a way that best serves our undergraduate students.”

Faculty support amounted to more than just financial support when her graduate funding ran out. It started when she was applying to schools—and being told to narrow her focus. Few media studies doctoral programs specialize in both social sciences and culture studies work; more than a few admissions offices were impressed with Turner’s credentials, but warned her to pick a lane.

“CU was one of the few places that didn’t try to change me,” she said. “I got accepted and the director called and said, ‘How can I get you to come here?’ And everything I had imagined about Colorado came to fruition when I visited—it was everything I wanted, academically and socially.”

Turner’s advisor, Stewart M. Hoover, was among the people who challenged her, rather than changing her.

“You got a sense from Anna right away that she had the moxie to stick through a long and arduous doctoral program,” said Hoover, an emeritus professor of media studies who has worked in both the quantitative and qualitative spaces. “I wanted to encourage her because I felt she had the background, knowledge and drive to do something special.”

While it meant a longer program and more work on her part, Turner’s quantitative-meets-critical work hasn’t been a hindrance. In fact, she was among the 10 finalists at the university’s annual Three-Minute Thesis competition, where PhD students showcase their work and its impact to a nontechnical audience under strict time limits.

Turner’s work looks at polarization from the standpoints of both popular culture and social media. She devised surveys based on scenes from TV shows and social media posts to understand how people reacted to different messages—important because, when it comes to polarization in the media, most research has focused on the media we choose to watch, such as the different audiences for Fox News or MSNBC.

In interpreting her results, she found a lot of broad agreement about topics that fuel the media culture wars—surprising, but then, the business model of media and tech titans relies on driving users into different camps.

“The algorithms create echo chambers that we’re not selecting on our own,” she said. In a sense, we are—our feeds are built from what we like and don’t—“but the algorithms are doing the work for us, as opposed to when we just had cable news to choose from. We’re getting our news from algorithms, rather than from what we choose with popular culture.”

‘It’s a back and forth’

That’s worth studying because popular culture’s ability to influence is well documented. For instance, adding gay and lesbian characters to primetime television shows in the 1990s played a role in the mainstream public eventually becoming more supportive of same-sex marriage.

“Popular media imitates culture, but culture also imitates popular media. It’s a back and forth,” she said. “The idea that exposure to people we haven’t seen before can change our views is really interesting to me.”

A logical place to take this kind of work would be to a streaming service, to study how exposure to ideas can mitigate, rather than exacerbate, polarization. That’s her dream job.

“There’s a lot of nuance to my work that still needs to be pulled out,” Turner said. “I hope to do the kind of social experiments that help us examine how we introduce people to characters and story arcs, and how those play out beyond just a short clip you see as part of a survey.”

Hoover, her advisor, said that direction lines up with the values-based impact she wants her research to create.

“She has a set of ideas about the way we should live together as a society, and the way our politics ought to represent and express that,” he said. “I’m excited to see how she uses her research to promote that more helpful, more generalized view of what we as a society share in common.”

As she neared the finish of her PhD program, Anna Turner lost all her work in a fire. How she came back to complete her degree is a testament to her resilience.

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Communication that moves

Amanda J. McManus — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 18:25:25 +0000

Communication that moves Amanda J. McManus Wed, 02/26/2025 - 11:25

By Joe Arney
Photos by Jack Moody (StratComm’24)

The study of communication, as José G. Izaguirre III knows, is more than just interpreting the words. It’s also about how those words are heard—in a speech or an article, or in a post or on a poster.

It’s why he leans so heavily on showing communication in its original form, whether in the classes he teaches at CMCI or in a new book examining the formation of the Chicano movement.

“As I was analyzing these different texts, I was just struck by the intentionality to make things look a certain way, which really enriched the communication I was studying,” said Izaguirre, assistant professor of communication at the college, who goes by Joe. “It was clear that those aesthetics were part of the story, too—the degree to which photography, illustrations and designs played a significant role in movements.”

"It is possible for different people to come together around similar concerns, articulate different visions, but still try to work together to accomplish something good.
José G. Izaguirre III
Assistant Professor
Communication

Izaguirre’s book, Becoming La Raza: Negotiating Race in the Chicano Movement(s), traces the beginning of the movement—which originated among striking farm workers in California—through its early years. His research examines the communications that organized Latin American voices into a global political power.

“The book highlights how race is always implicated in different political circumstances—while demonstrating that however much we try to get away from the language of race, it’s always there,” he said. “I tried to show the inescapability of race as a part of communication through a story about how Mexican Americans navigated racial dynamics and promoted a racial identity.”

A good example: “Chicano,” once a pejorative label, was itself reclaimed by the organization as it rejected assimilation and sought to assert its Indigenous roots. But while the movement united under one banner, it was never a singular voice. Izaguirre’s book shows how activists created a political power against the backdrop of the Cold War.

“I think the book highlights the importance of everyday activist movements, or even politically interested individuals who have concerns that are part of a broader community or communal concern,” he said. “It takes seriously these moments of everyday communication and spotlights them in ways that are maybe not typical.”

“Everyday communication” in the 1960s was, of course, very different than today, when demonstrations largely exist and are communicated in ephemeral digital spaces—what’s trending today is tomorrow’s relic. Much of Izaguirre’s source material was donated documents—leaflets, photos, newspapers and so on—that made this project possible.

It’s how he was able to present so many period pieces in his book, alongside close readings of iconic artifacts like the National Farm Worker Association’s El Plan de Delano, or the poem “I Am Joaquin.” And there is value, he said, in seeing how those pieces are designed, even if it’s text-based, like the Delano document, co-written by Cesar Chavez, to guide their march through California. It contains a list of demands and concerns that, Izaguirre said, are valuable to see in their original context—and language.

Another level of engagement

“When I show these materials in classes, I want to show that communication as close as possible to what it would have been like to encounter it at the time,” whether that’s a picture, a pamphlet or a speech, he said. “I wouldn’t call it an epiphany, but there’s some level of understanding that happens when I show them the whole document. Because it’s not just text pulled out of somewhere—it’s communication they can see for themselves.”

That also means students encounter the original communication in its original language. For much of La Raza, of course, that’s Spanish.

“I do show them an English version, so they understand the meaning of the words, but seeing it in its native language, they get almost the emotion of the words,” Izaguirre said. “Seeing the original document puts it in that cultural or historical context.”

It’s something he hopes readers and students consider in the context of modern political movements, from the iconography at campaign rallies to how people find one another and organize digitally. But he also hopes those readers will be challenged to rethink the narrative that movements—or communities—can be viewed singularly. The Chicano movement is a prime example.

“It can be harmful, to see communities being labeled in such a way that they’re cast as the opposition,” he said. “It’s easy to consolidate groups and label them as friend or foe. What’s harder is politics—which is really about building partnerships and opportunities for equal engagement.

“What I hope the book shows is that it is possible for different people to come together around similar concerns, articulate different visions, but still try to work together to accomplish something good.”

A new book looks at the rise of the Chicano movement through the lens of communication, from speeches to newspapers.

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A better way

Amanda J. McManus — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 18:52:49 +0000

A better way Amanda J. McManus Tue, 02/25/2025 - 11:52

By Joe Arney
Photos by Kimberly Coffin (CritMedia, StratComm’18)

There’s a brick paver walkway that crosses 18th Street on the �� campus by the ATLAS Institute. Thousands of pedestrians use it each day, crossing the brick path while cyclists, e-scooters, buses, emergency vehicles and the occasional car wend their way down the street.

“Design is a powerful tool to make an impact, because then we’re not telling certain people they’re functionally not correct. Instead, we’re saying, how do we create an environment that actually matches the needs of the user?
Elena Sabinson
Director
Neuro D Lab

Is it a crosswalk?

From the description above, you might assume so. But there’s no signage warning drivers of pedestrian activity, or telling them to stop or yield. And you’ll find none of the striping associated with crosswalks.

“When the students describe it, they’re like, ‘It’s basically Frogger out there,’” said Elena Sabinson, an assistant professor of environmental design at CMCI and director of the Neuro D Lab, which explores the intersection of design, neurodiversity, equity and innovation. “That space of ambiguity becomes a place where conflict or confusion happens. The lab looks at how that affects everyone, but especially neurodivergent folks who might rely on clarity and clear signage to understand how to navigate things.”

Neurodivergence has become a global point of conversation as a movement builds to both recognize that each brain functions differently and to better understand how to design products, services, buildings and so on that serve everyone, instead of asking people to conform to the built environment.

“Design is a powerful tool to make an impact, because then we’re not telling certain people they’re functionally not correct,” Sabinson said. “Instead, we’re saying, how do we create an environment that actually matches the needs of the user?”

Elena Sabinson crosses the street in front of the CASE building. While the brick paver walkway looks like a crosswalk, it lacks striping and signage indicating it's safe to cross, which can confuse both pedestrians and drivers. Part of Sabinson's research work involves assessing wayfinding on the �� campus for confusing design cues.

A new direction for her work

Sabinson is uniquely suited to such challenges. As a PhD student at Cornell University, she was studying self-soothing technologies—especially in the area of soft robotics, like breathing wall panels that help people regulate their biorhythms during stressful experiences—when she received a diagnosis of autism and ADHD.

“That changed the trajectory of my research,” she said. “I’m still focusing on emotional well-being, but with this environmental lens of how to create inclusive, accessible products that are centered around self determination, agency and empowerment.

“I make a choice to say I’m an autistic-led lab, and I invite this type of conversation in by making that choice, rather than just being an autistic person doing research.”

Bringing students into her lab and giving them opportunities to engage these challenges will, she said, push her to question some of her own assumptions developed after years of working in the field. But it’s also creating opportunities to potentially reshape the campus, such as the wayfinding project examining features like the ambiguous campus crosswalk.

That work is partially funded by an undergraduate research opportunities program grant issued by the university. Earlier this month, Sabinson’s work was accepted by EDRA56, the influential conference of the Environmental Design Research Association. She’s looking forward to presenting it this May, in addition to helping drive conversations around making the campus easier to navigate.

“One thing we have as a research lab is access to students who are really engaged and passionate about this work, and who want to take on projects that can’t always happen in industry, due to timeline and budgetary constraints,” she said.

Industry feedback

Another thing she wants through both the lab and her classes is the chance for ideas from industry to influence her students’ innovation. In a course she teaches on fidgets and stims, one student created the Cacti Clicker, a plastic cactus with moveable segments. When you twist it, it makes a clicking sound, which isn’t always acceptable in a work or school setting.

“So the student redesigned it so some of the spins make noise and some don’t, so you can still get the sensation if you’re in a crowded space,” Sabinson said. “That’s an example of how we field test these products with people, get feedback—and learn to take feedback—to make their products better.”

It also doesn’t look like a traditional fidget toy. That’s also by design—it just looks like a cactus statue on a desk in Sabinson’s office.

“A lot of what I consider in my work, and that we talk about in class, is the social stigma around using a fidget—that a lot of people might want to, but they’re considered to be toys,” she said.

The bigger goal is to eliminate that stigma altogether—but in the meantime, she said, this product is an option for people who need it, while “just living on your desk and looking like a decoration.”

Can design help those with neurodivergence be more comfortable in their environments? A new lab is searching for answers.

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Elena Sabinson demonstrates using an inflatable sensory band in her office. Part of Sabinson's research looks at inflatable surfaces and products that can be used by people managing anxiety to make them more comfortable in their environment.

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