News

• January 2, 2020

  Philadelphia’s Media Ecosystem is Broken. Can We Fix It?

  With local newsroom numbers decimated and traditional advertising models continuing to fail, the MIC Center hopes to identify new models for media that enable communities to be engaged in shaping and lifting up narratives that better represent them and address important social problems. Led by co-directors Annenberg Professor Victor Pickard, a Free Press board member, and Rutgers Professor Todd Wolfson, a Media Mobilizing Project board member, the Media, Inequality and Change (MIC) Center, Media Mobilizing Project and Free Press aim to address these issues by understanding how social change happens, the media’s role in creating obstacles and opportunities for structural reform, and what innovative, community-centered media and media-making can and should look like in the Philadelphia region.

• January 2, 2020

  Researchers Use a Material’s ‘Memory’ to Encode Unique Physical Properties

  A new study shows that, as materials age, they “remember” prior stresses and external forces, which scientists and engineers can then use to create new materials with unique properties.

• January 2, 2020

  Contemporary Art Enhances Penn Museum’s Africa Galleries

  The recently reinstalled Africa Galleries at the Penn Museum encompass 4,000 square feet and nearly 300 artifacts from Africa and the African diaspora. In this reimagined space, the historical pieces—statues, gold coins, carved ivory, richly dyed textiles—are juxtaposed with three groupings of contemporary art commissioned by Professor Tukufu Zuberi, the Africa Galleries’ lead curator.

• January 2, 2020

  Alumna Andrea Mitchell on Her Career in Journalism

  NBC News’ chief foreign affairs correspondent and Penn alumna spoke at Kelly Writers House about her 40-plus-year career. She discussed everything from breaking into TV journalism in the 1960s to moderating the Democratic presidential debate.

• January 2, 2020

  How Rituals Shape Our World

  From graduations to wedding ceremonies, baby showers to retirement parties, our lives are ordered by a series of rituals. But how do these rituals develop over time and what do they tell us about culture and society at large? At Penn home football games, fans throw toast onto the field after the third quarter. (Image: Chase Sutton) Undergraduate students in COMM 388: Ritual Communication—taught by Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies Litty Paxton—are taking a deep dive into the unique language of ritual to explore some of the answers to these questions.