Message from the Director, Terry L. Rentner

When Dr. Oliver Boyd-Barrett arrived at BGSU in 2005 to serve as director for the School of Communication Studies, he identified over 50 key research concepts among faculty members.  Within these concepts, three principal clusters emerged.  

The first cluster, Emerging Communication Technologies, brings together research interests to do with the computer mediated communication, internet, online journalism, issues of online copyright, law, user contracts and business models, interactive media, information society, information technology, cyber imperialism, cyber-ethnography, cyberspace and culture.

The International Media cluster brings together development communication, foreign correspondence, international news; international media and media flows, including international advertising, market research and public relations; communication issues in specific geographical areas (e.g. Caribbean, Chad, China, Eastern Europe, Middle East, Morocco, Russia, Tunisia etc.), newsworthiness, post-colonial studies; issues of culture and identity, including feminism and gender; discourse, specific media genres (e.g. rap).

A third, more eclectic area is the Health Communication cluster that brings together crisis, social problem or "applied" communications. Some of the specific topics studied in this cluster include eating disorders, pedagogy, parenting, children, alcohol misuse, organization communication, prisons, women's issues and minorities.

Perhaps included within this third category or, alternatively, needing a separate, fourth, category ("media industry?"), are such topics as political economy, sales, public opinion, news professionalism; media management, roles and occupations; media history; media diversity, concentration, convergence, and ownership; intellectual property, media law, national security and surveillance issues, telecommunications policy, media representations; uses and gratifications or reception analysis.

Some areas of research that fit into one or more of the clusters include research methods, rhetoric and persuasion, performance and production.

Please click here for more information about the three research clusters.