Areas of Concentration

The Communication area of the interdisciplinary doctoral program has faculty with research interests in six interconnected areas:

• Communication and Technology
• Computational Social Science
• Health Communication
• Interpersonal and Family Communication
• Language and Social Interaction
• Organizational Communication

Our world-class faculty have earned national and international recognition for their scholarship, receiving top honors such as paper, article, book, and career achievement awards.

Doctoral students in Communication conduct problem-oriented research that focuses on a variety of prominent contemporary topics, such as:

• Social networks
• Social media
• Online privacy and anonymity
• Children's media use
• Community health programs
• Health campaigns
• Medical provider-patient interaction
• Interaction on emergency and emotional support telephone lines
• Family involvement in palliative care
• Global teams
• Organizational change
• Corporate social responsibility
• Institutional leadership

Multiple centers and labs provide various opportunities for doctoral students, including:

• Center for Communication and Health Issues
• Center for Organizational Development and Leadership
• Computational Research, Organizations and Media Lab
• Computational Social Science Lab
• Network Science Lab
• Rutgers University Conversation Analysis Lab

For more information, contact Communication area coordinator, Matthew Weber.

Sample Course Offerings:

• Mediated Communication Theory
• Social Media
• Social Networks
• Work and Communication Technology
• Children and Media

Affiliated Faculty:

• Mark Aakhus
• Marya L. Doerfel
• J. Sophia Fu
• Jeffrey Lane
• Katherine (Katya) Ognyanova
• Yonaira Rivera
• Sarah Shugars
• Matthew Weber

Sample Course Offerings:

• Health Communication
• Interpersonal Health Communication
• Communication and Community Wellness
• Community Health
• E-Public Health
• Health Message Design
• Communicating about Sexual Health and Relationships
• Mental Health
• Communities and Health
• Applied Interaction Research in Health and Wellness
• Provider-Patient Communication

Affiliated Faculty:

• Galina Bolden
• Kathryn Greene
• Shawnika Hull
• Matthew Matsaganis
• Lisa Mikesell
• Yonaira Rivera
• Brent Rubin
• Lea P. Stewart
• Jennifer Theiss
• Itzhak Yanovitsky

Sample Course Offerings:

• Interpersonal Communication Theory
• Interpersonal Health Communication
• Uncertainty and Communication
• Relational and Family Communication
• Communicating about Sexual Health and Relationships

Affiliated Faculty:

• Galina Bolden
• Kathryn Greene
• Kristina Scharp
• Jennifer Theiss
• Maria Venetis

Sample Course Offerings:

• Communication Processes in Organizations
• Language and Social Interaction
• Intercultural Communication
• Qualitative Research Methods
• Introduction to Conversation Analysis
• Applied Interaction Research in Health and Wellness
• Provider-Patient Communication

Affiliated Faculty:

• Mark Aakhus
• Galina Bolden
• LIsa Mikesell

Sample Course Offerings:

• Organizational Communication Theory
• Leadership in Groups and Organizations
• Organizational Networks
• Dynamics of Global Organizations
• Organizational Culture
• Communication Processes in Organizations
• Organizational Decision Making
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Communication and Organizational Change
• Interorganizational Relationships and Stakeholder Communication

Affiliated Faculty:

• Mark Aakhus
• Marya L. Doerfel
• J. Sophia Fu
• Eu Gene Lee
• Nitzan Navick
• Brent Rubin
• Matthew Weber
• DaJung (DJ) Woo

Sample Course Offerings:

• Text as Data
• AI for Social Science
• Natural Language Processing
• Communication Networks

Affiliated Faculty:

• J. Sophia Fu
• Jianing Li
• Katherine (Katya) Ognyanova
• Sarah Shugars
• Matthew Weber

SC&I Computational Social Science Cluster

Get to Know the Library and Information Science Concentration (iSchool)
The Library and Information Science area of concentration (also known as iSchool) in our interdisciplinary Ph.D. provides an excellent environment for research in such areas as Human Information Behavior; Information Retrieval, Language and Communication; Information Agencies and Artifacts; Learning, Youth, Information and Technology; and Social and Community Informatics. The school includes world-renowned faculty who lead and teach in these areas. Their accomplishments are reflected in a large pool of scholarly publications, awards, and grants.

Health information and Technology encompasses both human and technical factors that influence collection and use of health information. This theme seeks to develop solutions to identify barriers to, and promote facilitation of, health information exchange primarily by applying insights from social, clinical, and behavioral sciences. This dynamic field is evolving quickly and includes issues which span individuals interacting with tools that enable the collection and use of personal health information to specialized knowledge and skills required to support development, adoption, and use of health information systems (e.g. electronic health records, patient portals). This broad area covers information science, health education, communication, and clinical care delivery for inpatient and ambulatory care settings. Multiple LIS faculty members undertake research in related areas, including, but not limited to:

• Theory and methodology supporting investigations concerning the generation, storage, retrieval, and use of health data, information, and knowledge
• Health IT adoption and use
• Health IT evaluation
• Data Science in Health
• Decision Science

Afflitated Faculty:

• Amelia Acker
• Kaitlin Costello
• Sunyoung Kim
• Charles Senteio

Human Information Behavior concerns all aspects of human interactions with information. This theme offers students the opportunity to study all aspects of interacting with information and information technologies. These interactions are studied in a wide variety of contexts, such as interaction in web search engines, collaborating with others in knowledge work, sharing in social networks, information seeking in everyday life, organizing personal or work information, designing technologies and tools for information seeking, and evaluating information technologies to support people’s information interactions. Multiple LIS faculty members undertake research in related areas, encompassing people’s interactions with information at personal, social, institutional, and cultural levels; including, but not limited to:

• Information seeking and retrieval
• Information sharing
• Information use
• Information organization and archiving
• Information curating
• Information policy

Affiliated Faculty:

• Kaitlin Costello
• Marija Dalbello
• E. E. Lawrence
• Britt Paris
• Rebecca Reynolds
• Charles Senteio

The Human-Computer Interaction theme encompasses a wide range of computing technology and its use, as every aspect of modern life requires interacting with computers in some way.  
This field offers students the opportunity to study all aspects of living, working, and building in a digital world, including developing an understanding of human needs through ethnographic field studies; designing new technology; evaluating the use of technology both in laboratory experiments and through field deployment, and devising theories about information technology and its role in society. Multiple LIS faculty members undertake research in related areas, including, but not limited to:

• Human factors and rrgonomics
• Computer-supported collaborative work
• Environmental sustainability
• Game design and development
• Information visualization
• Mobile computing and ubiquitous computing

Affiliated Faculty:

• Shagun Jhaver
• Sunyoung Kim
• Vivek Singh
• Anselm Spoerri

The Information Institutions, Artifacts, and Documents theme involves the study of socio-technical and socio-material dimensions of information systems, infrastructures, and institutions in an emergent and evolving political, legal, economic, social, and cultural framework that draws on sociological, historical, and technological approaches. Faculty recognize that these phenomena are complex and constructed through processes that require critical positions and reliance on a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies to study their lifecycles in the micro, medium, and macro-levels of society. Multiple LIS faculty members undertake research in related areas, including, but not limited to:

• Forms and document and media ecologies (artifacts) including the studies of institutions, knowledge production, transmission, and knowledge domains
• History and cultures of the book, reading experience, and reading communities, material texts
• Preservation and circulation of information
• Theory of knowledge and social epistemology
• Development of libraries and information agencies and their collections, and associated services
• Intellectual property and information rights
• Integrity, authority, and authenticity

Affiliated Faculty:

• Marc Aronson
• Kaitlin Costello
• Marija Dalbello
• E. E. Lawrence
• Britt Paris
• Rebecca Reynolds
• Charles Senteio

Information seeking can inherently be seen as a human learning process that involves human inquiry. In the Information, Learning, and Technology theme, those researching and teaching in this domain aim to foster a deeper understanding of the cognitive, affective, and social processes that facilitate inquiry, learning, and knowledge co-construction, often through learners’ uses of e-learning and information technologies. Our work advances theories of learning, inquiry, and information seeking, as well as design of learning systems, environments, and instructional models. Multiple Library and Information Science faculty members undertake research in related areas, including (but not limited to):

• Design and use of learning systems
• Learning by the full diversity of youth, adults, elders and specialized populations
• Information, communication, and technology (ICT) issues in computer supported collaborative learning
• School librarianship pedagogy and praxis
• Digital divide, literacies, access, and learning systems

Affiliated Faculty:

• Marc Aronson
• Lilia Pavlovsky
• Rebecca Reynolds

The Information Retrieval and Language Analysis theme focuses on research that examines information retrieval in its broadest sense. This field encompasses the development and assessment of automatic systems that support user retrieval of text, audio and visual documents from large collections, and improved understanding of how real people interact with information retrieval systems. One goal is to use this understanding to develop systems that meet the needs of different user communities. By extension, research on information retrieval has come to include data mining, computational linguistics, and corpus linguistics, all of which can be viewed as techniques for improving information retrieval. Multiple LIS faculty members undertake research in related areas, including, but not limited to:

• Individual, collaborative, social, and organizational information retrieval
• Interactive information retrieval
• Natural language processing, information extraction, information organization

Affiliated Faculty:

• Vivek Singh

Social Computing refers to the design, development, deployment, validation, and refinement of various technologies as they aid and in turn impact human processes on individual, community, and societal scales. Studying such phenomena in a data-driven manner requires the creation of methodological and conceptual advancements at the intersection of advanced analytics and social behavior. Multiple LIS faculty members undertake research in related areas, including, but not limited to:

• Computational Social Science
• Collaborative Gaming, Health, and Education
• Data Science for Social Good
• Social Network Analysis
• Social Media

Affiliated Faculty:

• Kaitlin Costello
• Shagun Jhaver
• Sunyoung Kim
• Britt Paris
• Rebecca Reynolds
• Vivek Singh

The Media Studies area of the Ph.D. program is run by the faculty of the Journalism and Media Studies Department. Our faculty are nationally recognized scholars who have received major grants and fellowships, as well as prestigious awards for books, articles, and teaching excellence. We publish in the leading journals in our fields and many write for popular newspapers, magazines, and online publications.

Our faculty have doctoral degrees in a variety of fields, including communication, journalism and mass communication, sociology, history, anthropology, and other areas. We study the operation of media at the local, national, and international levels, and our research methods range from the humanistic to the social scientific. Specific areas of faculty expertise include the relationship of media and journalism—including digital, online, and social media—to topics such as politics and public policy; political and social activism and movements; popular culture and cultural industries; children, youth and media; race, gender, religion, ethnicity, and identity; technology and innovation; the formation of political opinions and attitudes; collective memory; and media theory and cultural studies.

Doctoral students who enroll in this area of concentration study a broad set of questions about the news, communication, and entertainment media: their political, social, psychological, and economic impacts; the historical, cultural, and technological conditions that have given rise to them; and the ways they operate in American society and in other societies around the world. The required courses for this area are foundational classes in media theory and critical research methods, which are supplemented by a rich variety of elective courses.

The Certificate Program in Media Studies allows students enrolled in other Rutgers University Ph.D. programs to earn a Certificate in Media Studies. The program allows students to familiarize themselves with the theories, methods, and content of the field of media studies, including such subfields as cultural studies, the political economy of media, journalism and media history, technology and digital innovation, media and politics, promotional culture, and science communication.

The certificate program provides students from any discipline with foundational knowledge towards teaching courses in media studies or courses in their own disciplines that have a specific focus on media. It also gives them the skills and knowledge to make media-related subjects a central part of their scholarly research and to supplement their own disciplinary expertise with a facility in contemporary issues of media. Students in the certificate program benefit from engagement with the expertise of the field’s leading researchers.

The certificate program consists of nine credits. At least six credits must be taken from the core course offerings of the Media Studies area in the School of Communication and Information (SC&I) Ph.D. program. Three additional credits may be taken in cognate courses offered in other departments that deal substantially with media issues.

Admission Requirements

Doctoral students enrolled in any Rutgers program are eligible for the Certificate in Media Studies. Admission to the certificate program shall be granted by the Media Studies area coordinator or department chair, after consultation with the chair or graduate studies director of the student’s home department. Applicants must have completed one semester of coursework in SGS and maintained a B average. Ph.D. students who are interested in earning the Certificate in Media Studies should complete a registration form and email it to the Media Studies Ph.D. Area Coordinator. Ph.D. students who are interested in earning the Certificate in Media Studies should complete a registration form and email it to the Media Studies Ph.D. Area Coordinator.

Curriculum and Required Credits

The main curriculum of the Certificate Program shall be the existing course offerings in the Media Studies area of the SC&I interdisciplinary Ph.D. program. It shall be supplemented by approved “cognate” courses offered by other academic departments at Rutgers University.

To obtain a Certificate in Media Studies, students must:

• Apply to the program and receive approval from the Media Studies area coordinator.
• Take two core Media Studies graduate courses offered through SC&I Ph.D. program. These shall be regular classroom courses, not practicums, independent studies, or other forms of individualized instruction.
• Take one additional course either in Media Studies or from a list of approved cognate courses in SC&I or another Rutgers program. Student admission to a cognate course depends on the permission of the course instructor.
• Submit, upon successful completion of the requisite courses, a letter confirming completion to the Media Studies area coordinator, who will approve it and report results to area faculty and Ph.D. director.
   

Media Studies Ph.D. Area Coordinator: John Pavlik

School of Communication & Information Ph.D. Director: Melissa Aronczyk

Media Studies Ph.D. Faculty