Great Talk Inc and The Alexander Grass Humanities Institute JHU present a free event – Social Media: Its Effect on Free Speech, the News & Social Norms. The Profits and the Trappings. This panel discussion will take place on Wednesday, April 10 at 7pm and hosted by BWTech at UMBC South, 1450 South Rolling Road, Baltimore, MD 21227. Registration is free for both in-person or Livestream. A free reception will immediately follow, thanks to the generous support of Glenmore Caterers.
PANEL OF EXPERTS
JENNIFER KEOHANE, Associate Professor & Program Director, Digital Communication, Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences, University of Baltimore.
Jennifer Keohane is associate professor at the University of Baltimore, where she directs the undergraduate program in digital communication and oversees the general education program in oral communication. She holds an MA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in rhetoric, politics, and culture, where she studied women affiliated with the American Communist Party, a project that became the book Feminist Voices and Communist Rhetoric in Cold War America.
As a rhetorical critic, Jennifer studies how advocates for social movements use symbols like language and images to make change in the world. In 2016, she co-founded the research lab for Character Assassination and Reputation Politics (CARP), where she studies how invective is weaponized in political communication. In collaboration with this research lab, she co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Character Assassination and Reputation Management and co-wrote Character Assassination and Reputation Management: Theory and Applications. You can also find her work in academic journals like Women’s Studies in Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, and the Journal for the History of Rhetoric.
DR ELIZABETH M H NEWBURY, Director of the Serious Games Initiative for the Wilson Center.
Dr. Elizabeth M H Newbury is the Director for the Serious Games Initiative for the Wilson Center, leading the Wilson Center’s use of games in engaging the public around policy research. As lead of the Serious Games Initiative, she leverages games as a tool for the public communication of science and policy research. Under her leadership, SGI is pursuing how public policy and science can come together in an interactive platform to increase public dialogue and engagement around timely and critical issues of today. Current projects include the Fiscal Ship, a game about the federal budget developed and maintained in collaboration with the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy with the Brookings Institute. The Wilson Center’s budget games have been played by over 3 million people worldwide.
Collaborating across the Wilson Center, her works in progress include games pertaining to topics ranging from cybsecurity and plastic pollution. Outside of the Wilson Center, she helps coordinate across federal agencies to help support the ecosystem of games used for social good, through chairing the Federal Games Guild, an informal community of practice with over 100 agency participants united by the purpose to see how they can leverage gaming technologies to meet mission goals.
She holds a B.A. in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College, and a Master and PhD from the Department of Communication at Cornell University, where her research interests revolved around understanding multiple dimensions of gaming audiences and the surrounding culture of those who play video games in the context of esports. She married into a Baltimore family and is contractually obligated to support the Ravens and O’s (when they don’t compete with the Nationals).
DR LANCE YONG JIN PARK, Professor at the School of Communications at Howard University, and Faculty Associate at Harvard Law School.
Dr. Lance Yong Jin Park is Professor at the School of Communications at Howard University and Faculty Associate at Harvard Law School. His works focus on the effects of emerging AI technologies in intersection with social and policy problems. Currently, his research looks at how the combination of AI, algorithm, and personal data contributes to social and racial inequalities in information consumption. Dr. Lance Yong Jin Park’s book The Future of Digital Surveillance (University of Michigan Press, 2021) examines AI in its perpetual appetite for data surveillance, AI and social media.
He was an inaugural 2022-23 BKC, RSM Visiting Professor, at Harvard; received several external grants from Facebook, Scripps Foundation, ANA, Urban Comm. Foundation, and more. The most recent grant is from Mozilla Foundation, as the grant aims to study and teach how to debias AI algorithmic modeling. He was previously a Research Fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, and EPIC (Electronic Privacy Info Center), DC. He made a policy testimony at FCC; consulted FTC for dark patterns online; and received numerous top papers awards from top info-communication conferences. He completed his doctorate at the University of Michigan and his MA at USC Annenberg School.
MODERATOR: DR MARK FELDSTEIN, Richard Eaton Chair of Broadcast Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Mark Feldstein spent 20 years as an award-winning on-air investigative correspondent at CNN, ABC News and various local television stations.
On assignment, he was beaten up, subpoenaed and sued in the U.S.; detained and censored by government authorities in Egypt; and escorted out of the country under armed guard in Haiti.
His exposés led to resignations, firings, multimillion dollar fines and prison terms — and more than 50 journalism awards, including two George Foster Peabody medallions, the Columbia-DuPont baton, the national Edward R. Murrow broadcasting prize and nine regional Emmys.
As a scholar, Feldstein has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals. His book “Poisoning the Press” earned top academic awards for research and was selected by The Washington Post and other newspapers as a best book of the year.
Feldstein is regularly quoted as a media analyst by leading outlets in the U.S. and abroad, and has testified as an expert witness on First Amendment issues before Congress and in court, most recently on behalf of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
He has traveled to more than 30 countries and lectured around the world on investigative reporting, censorship, freedom of the press, and journalism history and ethics.
