Center for Media at Risk: 2019-2020 Intro Colloquium

Speaker(s): Natalia Roudakova & Silvio Waisbord

On Wednesday, September 4 we welcomed our 2019-2020 Visiting Scholars!

Natalia Roudakova is a cultural anthropologist (Ph.D., Stanford University, 2007) working in the fields of political communication, journalism and media studies, with an interest in moral philosophy and political and cultural theory. Roudakova has a broad international research and teaching profile, having worked as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication, University of California in San Diego; as Visiting Professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam (Netherlands); and as Researcher in the Department of Communication at Södertörn University, Sweden. In 2013-2014, Roudakova was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California, where she completed her award-winning book, Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Losing Pravda examines the spectacular professional unraveling of journalism in Russia during the 1990s and 2000s and its societal ramifications.  More broadly, Losing Pravda tracks how a post-truthsociety comes into being, illuminating the historical and cultural emergence of “fake news,” disinformation (kompromat) and general distrust in politics and public life. Roudakova’s new research is focused on the phenomenology of news perception in the digital age. Specifically, she is studying how young adults in Russia perceive and practice news, and how news is made meaningful in their everyday lives.

Roudakova is the Fall 2019 Visiting Scholar at the Center for Media at Risk and teaching a graduate course Journalism, Truth and Trust. She will present a public lecture on October 15, 2019 and a colloquium on November 20, 2019.

Silvio Waisbord is Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. He is the author and editor of sixteen books, including more recently Communication: A Post-Discipline (Polity, 2019) and Routledge Companion to Media and Scandals (edited with Howard Tumber, Routledge, 2019), and journal articles, book chapters and newspaper columns on journalism, politics and social change. His forthcoming book is A Communication Manifesto (Polity). He is the former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Communication and the International Journal of Press/Politics. He has lectured and worked in more than 30 countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. He is a Fellow of the International Communication Association. He has served on the Advisory Board of the Latin American program of Open Society Foundations. He holds a Licenciatura in sociology from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, San Diego.

Waisbord is the Spring 2020 Visiting Scholar at the Center for Media at Risk and will teach a graduate course, Populism and Media. He will present a public lecture on January 21, 2020 and a colloquium on March 18, 2020.

Event details

Annenberg School for Communication