News/Research

BCNM Welcomes New Students to the DE & Graduate Certificate in New Media

10 Apr, 2013

BCNM Welcomes New Students to the DE & Graduate Certificate in New Media

We are delighted to welcome eleven new graduate students to our Designated Emphasis and Graduate Certificate programs:

MA Certificate

Elizabeth Keegan is an MFA student in the Department of Art Practice. Her work focuses on the potential of game spaces to facilitate the creative expression of users and enable the latter to become co-creators of a game’s design.

Jason Fritz Michael Glassford is pursuing an MFA in Art Practice. His work focuses on the idea of transformation, the ability of individuals to transform their own identities, the transformative potential of objects and environments, and how transformation is packaged and sold by the self-help industry and healthcare industrial complex.

Kelsey Brannan is pursuing a Master’s degree in Architecture. She is interested in researching the ways that the digital can become a resource for the construction of built environments and vice versa.

Corey Reynolds is pursuing his Master’s degree in Public Policy. His research takes place at the intersection of information technology, disaster sociology and emergency management and explores the changing way with which citizens and authorities in distress use new media technologies, including broadband, social networks and crowd-sourcing tools.

Divya Anand is pursuing a Master’s degree in Information. Her areas of research interest include trust issues and commerce in India, marketing through blogs (with specific focus on bloggers-turned-authors in India), and the psychology of gamification.

Designated Emphasis

John Scott is pursuing a Ph.D. in Education. His work focuses on youth communication across global social networking sites and video production. He is particularly interested in digital narrative as it relates to multi-site, global collaboration and re-mix culture. His work focuses on how the remixing and repositioning of images in local narratives circulated globally lead to their manifestation as open semiotic texts layered with meaning and ambiguity.

R. Stuart Geiger is pursuing a Ph.D. in Information. His dissertation focuses on the roles of automated software agents (bots) in regulating online communities.

Renee Pastel is pursuing a Ph.D. in the Department of Film & Media. Her research focuses on the screen treatment of the Iraq/Afghan Wars and the shaping of public opinion, with particular emphasis on the relative success of fictional treatments vs. documentary representations, the role of women, and the use of new media (i.e., digital cameras, instant video messaging).

Joseph Akel is in the doctoral program in Rhetoric. His research interests include theoretical discourse, studio-based practice, and scientific innovation in the investigation of relationships between visual culture and media technologies.

Reza Alaeddini is in the JSD program at the Boalt School of Law. His dissertation argues for recognition of access to cyberspace as an urgent interest of citizenry. His research is grounded in positive social analysis, normative political theory and legal institutional design. He approaches cyberspace as a social construct or a notional environment that embodies the experience of the virtual world and acts as a novel site of socialization, enculturation and public discourse.

Jen DiZio is pursuing a Ph.D. in Education. Her research focuses on online education and is oriented toward articulating a vision for a more ambitious and productive approach to online interaction using new media tools.