Wendy from Nebraska - Ph.D. in the Mass Communications and Media Arts College

I'm Wendy Weinhold, I grew up in Nebraska and I am a 4th year Ph.D. in the Mass Communications and Media Arts College. My research area is media studies on the broadest level possible.

I'm interested in media studies from all different angles.  But I am focused in qualitative research and my dissertation narrows in on print journalism, which is where I have a professional background.

Technically, right now my dissertation is without even a working title, but the previous working title that I was going with was "Letters from the Editor: American Journalists, New Media and Democracy."

Southern Illinois University Carbondale has exceptional faculty and a lot of really interesting opportunities I think to be involved in media, even at the graduate level.

I personally have done everything from work with the student print journalists at the Daily Egyptian, to having multiple different slots on air as a news anchor for WSIU TV, and I've also done some reporting for WSIU FM--a special arts program in focus.  So it's been a really good opportunity for me to get immersed in all kinds of levels of media production as well as media theory.

One of the reasons that it's so hard for me to pick a favorite class is because so many of the classes that I had in my first two years of graduate study were really inspiring.  Everything from Cinzia Padovani's Political Economy of Media class in which I was first really given the opportunity to encounter critical theory on a really in-depth level.  And then Lisa Brooten's Qualitative Methods course really gave me an exciting opportunity to come at qualitative methods from a variety of angles.

The opportunities that I've had to get in front of classrooms have been the most exciting portions of assistantships that I've had here in my graduate study at SIU.  Probably my favorite is the course that I taught this spring of 2010, Alternative Media in a Diverse Society, that's MCMA 204.  It's pretty standard taught by a MCMA advanced graduate student. I had 57 students and they were interested in media from such an amazingly broad array of specialties.

They came from across the university. It was a really near opportunity for me as a graduate student who spends most of my time at the Communications Building to get to see what Southern Illinois University Carbondale's undergraduate student body was like on a really wide level.

I'll talk about my favorite two conferences that I've gone to, the first is Union for Democratic Communication and UDC is a really terrific organization of communication scholars and activists who are really interested in pushing faculty, scholars, activists, media makers to think about the responsibility for what it is that the media is out there making in the world, and I came to UDC entirely through associations with faculty at SIUC, so that's pretty important. The other conference that I have most enjoyed is The Future of Journalism/Newspapers conference that is held at the University of Cardiff in Wales.

I have participated in that conference both of the years that it has been organized, and that tip came to me through Cinzia Padovani, one of my faculty members and one of my committee members who said hey, this is the thing you're interested in, why don't you apply? As a result of both of those conferences I have two publications from there, two articles that are in the Journal of Journalism Practice and then another article that was published in Kaleidoscope, which is a qualitative student peer-reviewed publication, a yearly publication that comes out of Southern Illinois University's Speech Communication department.

I want to be a professor, I'm just waiting for the right university to find me and bring me home, but ultimately what I really want to do is teach media studies and critical journalism scholarship.  I really enjoy teaching journalists as a former journalist myself. I also really enjoy getting them to think beyond simply the words they're putting on the page and the way they're organizing their ideas to question and consider the ways that they are making people and creating representations of ideas. Those are some really important things that I think journalists can really benefit from.