Faculty Biographies

Dr. Darlene M.  Hantzis is Professor of Communication where she also serves as chair of the department at Indiana State University.  She is a member of the Honors College faculty as well as a faculty member in the Gender Studies and International Studies programs.  Her scholarship addresses questions in the area of cultural communication theory and practice, with a focus on human identity and agency.  Her work has explored the construction and performance of identity in multiple media contexts, with special concern for the status of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity.  Dr. Hantzis received a Fulbright Hays award, an NEH grant, and a field study award to study Sri Lanka in the context of South Asia.  Her work has included a study of the Wayside street theatre and examinations of post-colonial identity and of insurrectionary movements in the late 20^th century.  Recent publications have interrogated motherhood in the academy and examined participatory democracy.    Dr. Hantzis regularly teaches Political Communication, Ethnography and Autoethnography, Persuasion Theories, Television Culture.  Dr. Hantzis has been awarded her university’s Distinguished Teaching Award and Distinguished Service Award as well as twice receiving the Outstanding Honors College Faculty award.

Dr. Shana Kopaczewski is an Associate Professor of Communication and member of the Graduate faculty at Indiana State University.  She holds a PhD in Interpersonal/Relational Communication from the University of Iowa. Her current research is centered mainly on intersections between interpersonal communication and new media, particularly online dating, stigma communication in online discussion boards, and discourses of the body in online environments. Recent publications have examined the perception of credibility in online dating profiles and analyzed how the expression of identity in online dating is discursively controlled and policed by other online daters. Dr. Kopaczewski regularly teaches Interpersonal Communication, Media and Identity, Persuasion Theories, and Gender Communication.

Description of Indiana State University

Indiana State University is a mid-sized public comprehensive institution offering the baccalaureate degree in approximately 100 programs and the masters and doctoral degree in 75 programs.  The University was founded by the state of Indiana in 1965 as a Teachers’ College to meet the burgeoning educational needs of the post-civil war period.  ISU is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission and has been granted special recognition for public and community service institution.  During the past decade, ISU has regularly been among the top 3 universities acknowledged as fostering civic and community engagement. The 14.000 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at ISU represent all states in the nation as well as 69 other countries.  The student population is highly diverse ethnically and enrolls nearly an equal number of female and male students across its eight academic colleges.

Title: Responding to Digital Media:  Revisiting, Renewing, and Inventing Media Theories

Precis: The saturating culture of social-digital media challenges us to revisit and renew theoretical frameworks that require expansion or elaboration to illuminate the new complexities, relationships, and possibilities of new sites of production and means of human interaction. 

We intend to foster a discussion of the ways in which central questions of communication and media studies are or may be re-presented.  We hope to address two of these central areas of inquiry:  the role and status of the Body and the inter-animation of orality and literacy.

Social media may be seen to offer individuals the opportunity to transcend or escape the corporeal and its fixed position in time and place.  This kind of disembodiment has been argued to sponsor resistance to constraint and oppression.  Further, social media present the opportunity to invent a digital corporeality through visual and linguistic codes and thereby to make new relationships and new rules of social interaction.  As we investigate how the construct of “Self” changes and is changed by new mediations, we can also question how other constructs respond to the changed landscape of positionality.  In particular, current events challenge the national body.

Digital media blur other distinctions as well.  We suggest that the tensive relationship of orality & literacy is enlivened by the current context of media and media studies.  As scholars revisit the rhetorical status of visual communication and witness the invention of 21^st century tropes (e.g. memes, gifs, bitmoji), the semiotic differentiation is unsettled.

We also hope to engage students in a discussion currently occupying US scholars responding to consequences of new media.  Specifically, “fake news.”