Rauf Arif, Ph.D. 

Assistant Professor

College of Media & Communication

Texas Tech University

QUESTIONS:

Where you work: College of Media & Communication (CoMC) @ Texas Tech University.

Where you got your Ph.D.: The University of Iowa.

Current favorite class: Social Media & Social Change. This grad level course explores the role that social media plays in social change, ranging from the comparative analyses of online political activism of authoritarian societies—such as the Arab Spring (2010/11)—to the most recent social movements in the Western settings—the Occupy movement, #Brexit, #MeToo, #Times Up, #Take a Knee and #BlackLivesMatter. This class looks at these modern social and political uprisings in the context of historical developments that have led to the most recent unrests and social movements of our time.

Current research project: My current research project is about understanding the role and contribution of communication in the development and sustainability of political uprisings in non-west societies, such as Pakistan, Egypt and Tunisia. As an outcome of my research work, I am happy to share my 2020 book, “Movements for Change: How Individuals, Social Media and Al Jazeera Are Changing Pakistan, Egypt and Tunisia” (Peter Lang Publishing). The book explores digital social movements in the context of digital media while discussing the historical contexts of the case studies.

Please follow this link to learn more about it: https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/71009?tab=aboutauthor&format=HC

Fun fact about yourself: I am a huge fan of Star Wars movies and The Mandalorian television series is my new obsession 🙂

Joe Saltzman (University of Southern California), has curated and created three videos of almost 23 hours of content that capture long-lost images of the journalist in silent film for the Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture project at USC Annenberg. The first video features excerpts from 56 movies from 1890 to 1919. The next two include excerpts from 150 movies from 1920-1929 and cover celebrity journalists, newsboys, and newspapers. The videos complement Saltzman’s five-year landmark study of The Image of the Journalist in Silent Film, 1890 to 1929, Parts One and Two, which contains an analysis of 3,462 silent films.

Will Mari (Louisiana State University) wrote about the history of American newsrooms as seen in cartoons for the British Library’s “American Collections” blog.

Owen Johnson (Indiana University) wrote a piece for the fall 2020 Ernie Pyle World War II Museum Newsletter, “Ernie Pyle & the Ku Klux Klan,” and was interviewed for a television spot about Pyle on the local ABC news affiliate.

Where you work: I am an associate professor in the journalism department in the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University, where I am also a faculty member in the Media and Communication Ph.D. program. 

Where you got your Ph.D.: I have a Ph.D. in Mass Communication from The University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and MAss Communication. As a timely sidenote, alums of this program have been pushing to change the college’s name upon learning that Henry W. Grady, known for being a proponent of “The New South,” included in his vision continued segregation and white supremacy across the South. More information on the name change effort can be found here.

Current favorite class:  I am very lucky to teach a range of classes in our Ph.D. program, and doubly lucky that Temple has long been a program committed to critical perspectives, qualitative inquiry, and theory-driven cultural studies work. I teach an advanced methods class on text-based methods, primarily critical textual analysis, mediated discourse analysis, visual analysis. This semester, I am excited to include units on the analysis of policy documents and institutional discourse, analysis of media objects and infrastructures, and approaches to using textual methods in digital spaces. I’ve found the methods and theoretical perspectives at the heart of British Cultural Studies to be a useful touchstone for this class and get really excited when our students discover how to think deeply and critically about texts and the ways in which they crystallize a range of social relations.

Current research project: I’ve got two projects running simultaneously, which is generally how I work. First, I am finishing a short book about journalism education in the digital age, looking at how discourses about digital changes in the news industry over the past couple of decades have situated journalism education as a particular site of discursive contest, where visions of the future are often struggles over who should have greater influence over the field of journalism. Secondly, I am continuing an ongoing project looking at how journalism and various other forms of public discourse have positioned tech industries as arbiters of the public sphere. Specifically, I am working on an essay looking at how Mark Zuckerberg has sat at the center of these discourses, finding that discussions and debates about his persona and personality often displace more urgent debates about what technology companies’ authority over our public lives should actually be.  

Fun fact about yourself: One time, Bob Dylan’s road manager obliquely threatened to slice off both of my thumbs.