[{"id":224,"date":"2026-10-22T14:21:38","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T19:21:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/?p=224"},"modified":"2026-10-22T14:41:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T19:41:09","slug":"faculty-promotions-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/faculty-promotions-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Faculty promotions 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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We are very proud of our 2026 faculty promotions: Profs. Kurt Braddock<\/a> and Margot Susca<\/a> (in photo at center right and far right, respectively) both obtained tenure<\/strong> and were promoted to Associate<\/strong> Professor; and Prof. Adrienne Massanari<\/a> (at left) was promoted to Full<\/strong> Professor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All three work with our PhD students in the School of Communication (SOC). They are pictured here with our Dean, Marnel Niles Goins<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We greatly look forward to their ongoing mentoring, teaching and scholarship in our intellectual community here in SOC. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are very proud of our 2026 faculty promotions: Profs. Kurt Braddock and Margot Susca (in photo at center right and far right, respectively) both obtained tenure and were promoted to Associate Professor; and Prof. Adrienne Massanari (at left) was promoted to Full Professor. All three work with our PhD students in the School of\u2026 Read More: Faculty promotions 2026 »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4245,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-updates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4245"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":234,"date":"2026-10-08T15:26:51","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T20:26:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/?p=234"},"modified":"2026-10-08T16:16:15","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T21:16:15","slug":"design-research-civic-media-for-new-conversations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/design-research-civic-media-for-new-conversations\/","title":{"rendered":"Design Research: Civic Media for New Conversations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One unusual benefit of AU is world-class research centers on media, from games to social media. This post describes one intersection with the AU Game Center.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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How can we open really new conversations about media, technology, and society? One strength of being in Washington DC is the way that people can physically have conversations across silos and lines of expertise\u2015very different from policy Zoom meetings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last week, American University’s Game Center hosted Danish civic designer Nadja Pass for a demonstration and conversation about Concopia\u2014a conversational card set featuring 50 cards that range from questions and stories to social issues of the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pass was in town to present a larger Concopia<\/em> exhibition<\/a> currently on view at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, where visitors can walk through the Concopian Chamber of Wonders, a labyrinth made from 33 giant Concopia cards. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Game Center visit offered an opportunity to experience the ideas behind the exhibition in a much smaller setting. Pass walked our group through the Concopia Cards and invited us to consider how carefully designed questions can create space for people to listen, reflect, and connect across differences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the demonstration, Pass introduced students to one of her favorite ways of using the cards: \u201clistening rounds,\u201d in which one person responds to a card while everyone else listens without commenting. The practice, she explained, creates room for something that rarely happens in everyday conversation: \u201cWhen they are not interrupted, then what comes in the second, third, or fourth wave of their thinking is usually much more interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cards span five categories, or what Concopia calls five approaches: Civic Desires, Reenchantments, Endangered Skills, Pivotal People, and Wonders of Nature. While some cards prompt large-scale thinking and societal impact, others focus on personal reflection regarding our skills, relationships, and connection to nature. This is an intentional structure\u2014one that allows us to pause, take a beat, and fully evaluate ourselves and the world around us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This approach aligns with the work of Playful City Lab<\/a>, which takes place within the Game Center. Our researchers explore how games and other playful experiences can create new ways for people to engage in civic life. In conversation with Professor Ben Stokes, who leads the Playful City Lab, Pass discussed how Concopia was inspired by a trend she noticed: people were finding it difficult to engage in everyday conversation. The cards fulfill a goal of connectivity, and implicitly, as a starting point for community-building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as Concopia invites us to reimagine and rethink, it also offers a reframing to our question: how can we open really new conversations about media, technology, and society? Maybe the first step to answering is identifying how we design experiences to help people talk, listen, and learn together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Concopia is on display at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library from September 9 through October 22.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One unusual benefit of AU is world-class research centers on media, from games to social media. This post describes one intersection with the AU Game Center. How can we open really new conversations about media, technology, and society? One strength of being in Washington DC is the way that people can physically have conversations across\u2026 Read More: Design Research: Civic Media for New Conversations »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4516,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9,11,6,5,10,7,8],"class_list":["post-234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","tag-american-university","tag-american-university-game-center","tag-civic-card-game","tag-concopia","tag-game-center","tag-game-design-research","tag-playful-city-lab"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4516"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":237,"date":"2026-10-07T08:50:54","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T13:50:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/?p=237"},"modified":"2026-10-07T08:50:54","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T13:50:54","slug":"empowering-democracy-portulans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/empowering-democracy-portulans\/","title":{"rendered":"October 16th “Empowering Democracy” Forum Featuring Beth Simone Noveck"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In collaboration with the Portulans Institute in Washington, DC, the School of Communication (SOC) at American University invites you to a forum entitled \u201cEmpowering Democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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The forum will present the first report on findings of research by the Portulans Democracy Team on innovations in democracy, entitled \u201cTo Empower Democracy\u201d. The report will be discussed throughout the day, accompanied by a keynote entitled \u201cInstitutionalizing Participation: From Democratic Innovation to Democratic Practice in the Age of AI\u201d<\/em> by Professor Beth Simone Noveck. Drawing on her new book, Reboot: AI and the Race to Save Democracy<\/em> (Yale University Press, 2026), her keynote asks what it takes to move democratic innovation from promising experiment to institutional practice. Focusing on more participatory forms of democracy, it explores how public institutions can build the skills, structures, technologies, incentives, and leadership needed to make participation consequential, durable, and scalable in the age of AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our keynote speaker, Beth Simone Noveck, is a professor at Northeastern University with appointments in law, engineering, policy, communications, and computer science. She directs the Burnes Center for Social Change and the GovLab. Her work focuses on how to use AI to strengthen democratic institutions, in line with the overall theme of the forum. She previously served in the White House, at 10 Downing Street, and in the German Chancellery, and was founding Chief AI Strategist and Chief Innovation Officer for the State of New Jersey. Beth founded the White House Open Government Initiative. Today she leads InnovateUS, which supports free public-sector learning, and its research initiative, the Observatory of Public Sector AI \u2014 the largest collection of data on the public sector and its use of AI. She created AI for Impact, which designs and deploys open-source AI tools to improve public outcomes, and Solving Public Problems, which trains the next generation of leaders and problem-solvers. In 2026, Beth joined the Australian Resilient Democracy Network as a Global Fellow and the Harvard Kennedy School as a Policy Fellow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Professor Laura DeNardis will introduce Professor Noveck, and moderate the Q&A for her talk. Dr. DeNardis is Professor and Inaugural Endowed Chair in Technology, Ethics and Society at Georgetown University, where she also directs the Center for Digital Ethics. A scholar of technology governance and cybersecurity who has authored eight major books, DeNardis was named one of thirty-two global Innovators Building a Better Future by Wired UK. She is an affiliated fellow of the Yale Information Society Project, where she previously served as Executive Director, and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Professor DeNardis holds an AB in Engineering Science from Dartmouth College, an MEng from Cornell University, a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Law School.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The keynote is a brilliant highlight to a full-day of critical discussion of our study of how we can empower democracy, enabled by innovations shaping democratic institutions and processes. The report, \u201cTo Empower Democracy,\u201d is based on cross-national surveys of the public in Brazil, Germany, the UK, and the USA, along with 27 case studies of innovations across 19 countries worldwide. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

William Dutton, author of The Fifth Estate<\/em>, will open the morning with a presentation of key findings of the Portulans Democracy Project. This will be followed by the keynote, and selected case studies from the 27 by members of the Democracy Team, including innovations in public participation, journalism, public institutions and services, and public opinion and civic education \u2014 as well as a participant-observer study of the project seeking to use AI to build a Habermasian space for democratic communication. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

An overview of the research is available here: https:\/\/portulansinstitute.org\/portulans-democracy-project\/<\/a>, along with a list of the Democracy Team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please join this forum in person or online by registering HERE<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In collaboration with the Portulans Institute in Washington, DC, the School of Communication (SOC) at American University invites you to a forum entitled \u201cEmpowering Democracy.\u201d The forum will present the first report on findings of research by the Portulans Democracy Team on innovations in democracy, entitled \u201cTo Empower Democracy\u201d. The report will be discussed throughout\u2026 Read More: October 16th “Empowering Democracy” Forum Featuring Beth Simone Noveck »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4245,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4245"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":181,"date":"2026-04-27T11:58:29","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T16:58:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/?p=181"},"modified":"2026-04-27T12:08:05","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T17:08:05","slug":"2026-tri-school-phd-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edspace.american.edu\/media-technology-democracy\/2026-tri-school-phd-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"2026 Tri-School PhD Conference"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The research culture of AU was proudly on display across multiple schools at the “Tri-School PhD Conference” on April 10, 2026. Several of our PhD students were featured, as well as faculty respondents. PhD programs from the School of International Service (SIS), School of Communication (SOC), and School of Public Affairs (SPA) jointly organize the event each year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The experience provides a safe test-run for what it’s like to present at a professional conference. Just as importantly, students network and get input across disciplines. Below is the agenda, which featured work spanning from democratic institutions under stress to structural power and political economy. <\/p>\n\n\n

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