People
Melissa Aronczyk (Co-Chair)
Melissa Aronczyk is associate professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers. Her new book is A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism, Oxford University Press, 2022 (co-authored with DEWG member Maria I. Espinoza). A Strategic Nature combines ethnography with interviews and archival research to reveal how PR affects the way we conceptualize environmental problems.
Youngrim Kim (Steering Committee)
Youngrim Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. Her research investigates how state institutions build and utilize digital technologies to manage complex governance challenges, especially in cases of imminent public health or environmental crises. She uses qualitative methods and ethnographic fieldwork to uncover how these emerging crisis-response technologies shape the ways we make sense of, and react to, moments of risk, uncertainty, and disturbance.
Yonaira M. Rivera (Steering Committee)
Yonaira (Yoni) Rivera is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and an Associate Member of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey. Her scholarship focuses on reducing health inequities and improving the well-being of Latinx and underserved communities through health communication initiatives. She uses qualitatively-driven, mixed methods and community-based participatory research to study social media health misinformation, cancer control and prevention, and disaster relief.
Jeffrey Lane (Co-Chair)
Jeffrey Lane (Ph.D. Princeton University) is an Associate Professor of Communication and Affiliate Graduate Faculty of the Sociology Department at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Digital Street (Oxford University Press), a neighborhood study of social media use. He uses urban and digital fieldwork methods to examine communication, technology, and social inequality.
Caitlin Petre (Steering Committee)
Caitlin Petre is an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies. Her work uses qualitative methods to examine the social processes, organizations, and actors behind the digital datasets and algorithms that increasingly govern the contemporary workplace. Petre’s book, All the News That’s Fit to Click (2021, Princeton University Press), is a behind-the-scenes look at how performance analytics are transforming the work of journalism, from the New York Times to Gawker Media.
Grant Lattanzi (Coordinator)
Grant is a Ph.D. student in Communication, Information, and Media at Rutgers whose dissertation research is examining ‘climate tech’ coalitions situating urban infrastructures as sites for technologized ‘disruption.’ As an interdisciplinary scholar, Grant draws from across the social sciences to ask questions at the intersection of technology and culture, with prior projects examining emerging technologies and civic participation, and digital platforms and public culture. Grant holds an M.A. in Communication, Culture, and Technology from Georgetown University.