SERVICE
Throughout my career, I’ve done my best to support my colleagues and home institutions. For instance, I've directed a masters program, served on faculty senate, redesigned curriculum, and chaired searches, faculty standing committees, and even my own department. I've also advised students, student media organizations, and UT's undergraduate research journal while serving the field as an editorial board member, peer reviewer for journals and scholarly associations, and external reviewer for colleagues at other institutions. This page recounts three ways I've sought to extend my service efforts off campus through internships, public lectures, and community engagement.
internships
As the coordinator of our department’s internship program, I have supervised over 400 for-credit internships through the COM 354 Internship in Communication course at over 100 advertising, public relations, content creation, entertainment, radio, television, and nonprofit host sites. I also created a video on the path from internship to job as part of a presentation that I give several times a year to high school guidance counselors visiting UT. In addition to my department-level duties, I served as the chair of the university internship committee for two years, was the lead author on the Internship Policies, Procedures and Guidelines Manual, and was invited to speak about internships to both the UT Employer Institute and the UT Board of Trustees. My interest in internships stems from my doctoral field work which investigated the failure of the American advertising industry to diversify its workforce through the Multicultural Advertising Internship Program (MAIP). I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to apply my research to university policies aimed at making internships more accessible to a wider range of students through the implementation of a more centralized process that maximizes equal opportunity while preserving academic rigor through the apprenticeship model.
PUblic lectures
I launched the Controversies in Communication lecture series in 2020 as a partnership between the University of Tampa and the Osher Life Long Learning Institute (OLLI-USF) that would engage the public with our faculty's latest research on how communication, culture, and technology disrupt and transform society. I framed the lectures as an intergenerational opportunity to examine contemporary media issues through the lenses of historical antecedents, ethical implications, and technological applications in a way that would remind our younger students that 1) they are not the first generation to wrestle with disruptive and controversial revolutions in communication technology and 2) studying these past controversies can help us better predict and shape the future by avoiding the known pitfalls of the past. Each lecture is followed by an interactive Q&A led by one of our undergraduate students and, to date, over a dozen different faculty members from the department of communication have presented their work. The posters below (designed by @wildcatdreams) represent a sampling and each links to that lecture's video recording.
community engagement
I got my start creating community-based media projects in high school when I participated in a documentary video exchange with another high school on the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico. In college, I worked as a camera operator and editor on A North Shore Portrait, a film about the artist/conservationist Dewey Albinson, who famously painted a 400 year-old "spirit cedar" overlooking Lake Superior. When I arrived on location ready to film, our Ojibwa guide Melvin Sherer told us that the tree was a sacred site for the Grand Portage Band, so no cameras allowed. It was a hard lesson learned about community consent, but one that continued to resonate as I made Choices Make a Difference for the St. Paul Public Schools about a mural project using Aztec imagery to promote environmentalism in a Latino district and then produced the documentary portion of Second Story Man for KTCA public television about a white artist trying to create a job training art project in a Black neighborhood. After college, I continued to co-create media for community-based non-profits like the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project's Young Writers Institute, Palo Alto High School's TEAM: Together Everyone Achieves More, the Pew Trusts Indivisible Project's It Goes Both Ways (which screened at the Atlanta Film Festival), and two projects for the Oakland Public Schools as a "Filmmaker in the Classroom:" Sí Se Puede: Cesar Chavez (which screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival), and the Urban Dreams Video Project's CRNN: Civil Rights News Now.
Choices Make a Difference (1994)
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Second Story Man (1996)
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It Goes Both Ways (2001)
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Civil Rights News Now (2004)
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Soon after arriving in Tampa in 2012, I began curating and facilitating DocNight, a documentary film and discussion series free and open to the public at the Portico in downtown Tampa. The series ran for four years and included 28 films and conversations on social justice topics such as prison reform, human trafficking, homelessness, global warming, homophobia, and bullying. In upstate New York, I volunteered to produce Walk Back in Time, a podcast audio tour featuring naturalist and cultural historian Bob Larson exploring the traces of a 19th century mountaintop community. Back on campus, I produced a film for The Chiselers, a volunteer organization dedicated to the preservation of Plant Hall, the university's most historic building, created a video to encourage faculty across the university to integrate citizenship and community-based learning into their courses, and produced a holiday concert for WEDU, Tampa’s local PBS affiliate, involving five departments, ten faculty, a over sixty student crew members and performers. A free community screening of my feature dance documentary Life After Life included a radio segment on the WMNF show Art in Your Ear, a pre-taped welcome from Tampa Mayor Jane Castor, and a post-screening Q&A that brought the film’s characters and collaborators up on stage to reflect on the process. And, when one of the dance project participants passed away, I complied outtakes and created a celebration of life video to show at her funeral. During my sabbatical, I produced five pro bono videos for local non-profits: Abby’s Organic Community Farm, the Portico Cafe, Brandi Geoit for County Commissioner, Chris Hunter for Congress, and Casa Crist. I also volunteered to present during the Spring Intern Industry Workshop at the Tampa Bay Arts & Education Network (TBAE), a non-profit community service organization, and appeared on their Filmmaker’s Spotlight later that year.
The Chiselers: preserving the past
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Citizenship: community-based learning
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WEDU: Let Heaven and Nature Sing
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WMNF Community Radio: Life After Life
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