The Brethren in Christ Church (BIC) is a River Brethren Christian denomination with roots in the Mennonite church, Radical Pietism, and Wesleyan holiness. They have also been known as River Brethren and River Mennonites. The Canadian denomination is called Be In Christ.
John Gordon Melton is an American religious scholar who was the founding director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion and is currently the Distinguished Professor of American Religious History with the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where he resides. He is also an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church.
Denis McQuail was a British communication theorist, Emeritus Professor at the University of Amsterdam, considered one of the most influential scholars in the field of mass communication studies.
Molefi Kete Asante is an American professor and philosopher. He is a leading figure in the fields of African-American studies, African studies, and communication studies. He is currently a professor in the Department of Africology at Temple University, where he founded the PhD program in African-American Studies. He is president of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies.
George Gerbner was a professor of communication and the founder of cultivation theory. He taught at Temple University, Villanova University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Hamid Mowlana is an Iranian-American author and academic. He is Professor Emeritus of International Relations in the School of International Services at American University in Washington, D.C. He was an advisor to the former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The Annenberg School for Communication is the communication school at the University of Pennsylvania. The school was established in 1958 by Wharton School alum Walter Annenberg as the Annenberg School of Communications. The name was changed to its current title in 1990.
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.
Dallas Walker Smythe was a political activist and researcher who contributed to a political economy of communications. He believed that research should be used to develop knowledge that could be applied to policies in support of public interest and the disenfranchised in the face of private capital. He focused his research on mass media and telecommunications. Some of his main ideas included the "invisible triangle", and the "audience commodity". Much of his effort was focused on differentiating between Administrative and Critical Communications research.
Mediatization is a process whereby the mass media influence other sectors of society, including politics, business, culture, entertainment, sport, religion, or education. Mediatization is often understood as a process of change or a trend, similar to globalization and modernization, where the mass media are integrated to an increasing degree into other sectors of the society. Political actors, opinion makers, business organizations, civil society organizations, and others have to adapt their way of communication to a form that suits the needs and preferences of the mass media – the so-called media logic. Any person or organization who want to spread their messages to a larger audience have to adapt their messages and communication style to make it attractive for the mass media.
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.
Chas S. Clifton is an American academic, author and historian who specialises in the fields of English studies and Pagan studies. Clifton currently holds a teaching position in English at Colorado State University-Pueblo, prior to which he taught at Pueblo Community College.
Sven Windahl is a Swedish professor of communication studies as well as a consultant in the field of organizational communication. His most influential work is the book Using Communication Theory from 1989, co-authored with Dr. Benno Signitzer and Jean T. Olson. The book has been translated into many languages.
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.
George E. Cheney is an educator, writer, speaker, facilitator, and consultant. Together with his wife and colleague, Sally Planalp, he has a primary residence in Moab, Utah. Cheney is an internationally recognized leader in the area of organizational communication and focuses his work on the improvement of organizational processes with special attention to the triple bottom line and the pursuit of socially and environmentally responsible economic development. Cheney draws from a variety of disciplines and professions in his work, including sociology, economics, political science, philosophy, marketing, management, and applied ethics.
Models of communication are simplified representations of the process of communication. Most models try to describe both verbal and non-verbal communication and often understand it as an exchange of messages. Their function is to give a compact overview of the complex process of communication. This helps researchers formulate hypotheses, apply communication-related concepts to real-world cases, and test predictions. Despite their usefulness, many models are criticized based on the claim that they are too simple because they leave out essential aspects. The different components and their interactions are usually presented in the form of a diagram. Several basic components and interactions reappear in many of the models. They include the idea that a sender encodes information in the form of a message and sends it to a receiver through a channel. The receiver needs to decode the message to understand the initial idea and provides some form of feedback. In both cases, noise may interfere and distort the message.
The Center for Media, Religion, and Culture is a research center in the University of Colorado's College of Media, Communication and Information, that aims at cultivating knowledge and promoting research on the representation and interpretation of religion in popular media, both inside and outside the U.S. The center was founded in 2006 by Professor Stewart M. Hoover, a Journalism and Mass Communication faculty known for his work on popular media and religions. In addition to hosting several international conferences that address current issues in media, religion and culture, the center offers fellowship programs for domestic and international scholars interested in conducting research on related subjects. The Center takes on various projects with research fellows to explore religion and media from varied angles and through new, developing theoretical frameworks. The Center aims to bring together scholars, professionals and the larger public to explore the variety of ways media and religion influence one another and our daily lives. The Center currently works on several projects including one on the "Third Spaces" of Religion and Media, as well as a project in conjunction with the University of Haifa, in Israel on Media Ambivalence. The Center also produces a radio show and has a group research blog.
Omer Call Stewart was an American cultural anthropologist and author who worked at the University of Colorado. He was a student of Alfred L. Kroeber. He defended Native American land claims and advocated for tribes legal use of peyote.
Shantilal Premchand Bhagat was the Director of Eco-Justice Concerns for the Church of the Brethren and the denomination's representative to the United Nations. He was an ordained minister in the denomination. He was also the Brethren representative to the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA's Eco-Justice Working Group.
Digital religion is the practice of religion in the digital world, and the academic study of such religious practice.
