Queer theory is a field of post-structuralism that emerged in the early 1990s out of queer studies and women's studies. The term can have various meanings depending upon its usage, but has broadly been associated with the study and theorisation of gender and sexual practices that exist outside of heterosexuality, and which challenge the notion that heterosexual desire is ‘normal’. Following social constructivist developments in sociology, queer theorists are often critical of what they consider essentialist views of sexuality and gender. Instead, they study those concepts as social and cultural phenomena, often through an analysis of the categories, binaries, and language in which they are said to be portrayed.
Communication studies or communication science is an academic discipline that deals with processes of human communication and behavior, patterns of communication in interpersonal relationships, social interactions and communication in different cultures. Communication is commonly defined as giving, receiving or exchanging ideas, information, signals or messages through appropriate media, enabling individuals or groups to persuade, to seek information, to give information or to express emotions effectively. Communication studies is a social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge that encompasses a range of topics, from face-to-face conversation at a level of individual agency and interaction to social and cultural communication systems at a macro level.
Everett M. "Ev" Rogers was an American communication theorist and sociologist, who originated the diffusion of innovations theory and introduced the term early adopter. He was distinguished professor emeritus in the department of communication and journalism at the University of New Mexico.
Wilbur Lang Schramm was a scholar and "authority on mass communications". He founded the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1935 and served as its first director until 1941. Schramm was hugely influential in establishing communications as a field of study in the United States, and the establishing of departments of communication studies across U.S. universities. Wilbur Schramm is considered the founder of the field of Communication Studies. He was the first individual to identify himself as a communication scholar; he created the first academic degree-granting programs with communication in their name; and he trained the first generation of communication scholars. Schramm's mass communication program in the Iowa School of Journalism was a pilot project for the doctoral program and for the Institute of Communications Research, which he founded in 1947 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, now housed in the UIUC College of Media. At Illinois, Wilbur Schramm set in motion the patterns of scholarly work in communication study that continue to this day.
Sexualization is to make something sexual in character or quality or to become aware of sexuality, especially in relation to men and women. Sexualization is linked to sexual objectification. According to the American Psychological Association, sexualization occurs when "individuals are regarded as sex objects and evaluated in terms of their physical characteristics and sexiness." "In study after study, findings have indicated that women more often than men are portrayed in a sexual manner and are objectified. In addition, a narrow standard of physical beauty is heavily emphasized. These are the models of femininity presented for young girls to study and emulate." According to the Media Education Foundation's, Killing Us Softly 4: Advertising's Image of Women, the sexualization of girls in media and the ways women are portrayed in the dominant culture are detrimental to the development of young girls as they are developing their identities and understanding themselves as sexual beings.
Lawrence Grossberg is an American scholar of cultural studies and popular culture whose work focuses primarily on popular music and the politics of youth in the United States. He is widely known for his research in the philosophy of communication and culture. Though his scholarship focused significantly throughout the 1980s and early 1990s on the politics of postmodernism, his more recent work explores the possibilities and limitations of alternative and emergent formations of modernity.
Nancy Baym, Ph.D. is an American scholar and Senior Principal Research Manager at Microsoft Research, formerly a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. She was a member of the founding board and former president of the Association of Internet Researchers, and serves on the board of several academic journals covering new media and communication. She has published research and provided media commentary on the topics of social communication, new media, and fandom.
Stephen G. Bloom is an American journalist and professor of Journalism at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City.
John Louis Lucaites is an American academic. He is a professor emeritus of rhetoric and public culture at Indiana University. In 2012, Lucaites was appointed as associate dean for arts and humanities and undergraduate education at Indiana University. His research concerns the general relationship between rhetoric and social theory, and seeks to contribute in particular to the critique and reconstruction of liberalism in contemporary social, political, and cultural practices in the United States.
John Durham Peters is the María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film & Media Studies at Yale University. A media historian and social theorist, he has authored a number of noted scholarly works. His first book, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, traces out broad historical, philosophical, religious, cultural, legal, and technological contexts for the study of communication. His second book Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition updates the philosophy of free expression with a history of liberal thought since Paul of Tarsus. His most recent book The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media radically rethinks how media are environments and environments are also media. He has held fellowships with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust.
The School of Communication and Information (SC&I) is a professional school within the New Brunswick Campus of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. The school was created in 1982 as a result of a merger between the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, the School of Communication Studies, and the Livingston Department of Urban Journalism. The school has about 2,500 students at the undergraduate, masters, and doctoral levels, and about 60 full-time faculty.
Celine Parreñas Shimizu is a filmmaker and film scholar. She is well known for her work on race, sexuality and representations. She is currently Dean of the Arts Division at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Lynn Schofield Clark, Ph.D., is a media critic and scholar whose research focuses on media studies and film studies. She is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Media, Film, and Journalism Studies at the University of Denver. She is a prize-winning author of several books and articles on the role social and visual media play in the lives of diverse U.S. adolescents. In her 2017 book co-authored with Regina Marchi, Young People and the Future of News, Clark and Marchi utilize an ethnographic approach to tell the stories of how young people engage with social media and legacy media both as producers and consumers of news. The book received the 2018 Nancy Baym Book Award from the Association of Internet Researchers and the 2018 James Carey Media Research Award from the Carl Couch Center for Social and Internet Research Clark's book regarding parenting in the digital age is titled The Parent App: Understanding Families in a Digital Age. Clark’s main contributions are in the areas of family media studies, media rich youth participatory action research and the mediatization (media) of world religions.
Adrienne Russell is an American academic whose work focuses on the digital-age evolution of journalism and activist communication. She is currently Mary Laird Wood Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington and co-director with Matt Powers of the department's Center for Journalism, Media and Democracy.
Pornification is the absorption by mainstream culture of styles or content of the sex industry and the sexualisation of Western culture, sometimes referred to as raunch culture. Pornification, particularly the use of sexualised images of women, is said to demonstrate "how patriarchal power operates in the field of gender representation". In Women in Popular Culture, Marion Meyers argues that the portrayal of women in modern society is primarily influenced by "the mainstreaming of pornography and its resultant hypersexualization of women and girls, and the commodification of those images for a global market". Pornification also features in discussions of post-feminism by Ariel Levy, Natasha Walter, Feona Attwood, and Brian McNair. Pornography began to move into mainstream culture in the second half of the 20th century, now known as the Golden Age of Porn. Pornification is a product of the widespread availability of porn on the internet.
Carrie A. Rentschler is a scholar of feminist media studies and associate professor at McGill University located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Rentschler's work focuses on how media produces culture and its effects on women's lives and the reproduction of rape culture. She advocates anti-violence through the production of media to reduce violent crime.
Linda Claire Steiner is a professor at Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland. She is also the editor-in-chief of the journal Journalism & Communication Monographs, and sits on the editorial board of Critical Studies in Media Communication.
The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It is a 2008 book by Meenakshi Gigi Durham. The book's title refers to a term coined by Durham, the Lolita effect, which refers to the theory that media sexualization hinders the healthy development of pre-adolescent and adolescent girls. Its title is derived from Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita, where a middle-aged professor becomes obsessed with the titular 12-year-old girl. The term Lolita effect has since come to refer to the blame that can be put on young females for their part in abuse or harassment that they face, similar to the phrases "slut-shaming" or "victim-blaming".
Theodore L. Glasser is an American academic. He is professor emeritus of communication at Stanford University, and the author of several books about American journalism. His scholarship focuses on questions of press responsibility and accountability. Glasser believes journalists must put social justice advocacy above objective reporting. According to Glasser, Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it's hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.
Monica Balya Chibita is a Ugandan media professional, academic and academic administrator. She is a professor in the Faculty of Journalism, Media and Communication at Uganda Christian University.
Feminismportal 
