MM&C Research

MM&C faculty and students conduct research on a wide variety of interesting topics. A few examples are highlighted below, with more to come. To see what topics program alums completed as their dissertation projects, click here. For additional resources related to MM&C research, click here.

Media Literacy

Renee Hobbs is the founder of the Media Education Lab at Temple University, which improves media literacy education through scholarship and community service. Media Literacy, Copyright and Fair Use, a current project conducted in collaboration with the Center for Social Media at American University and funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, involves research on how perceptions of copyright law affect media literacy educators. Other current projects are listed here.

Psychological Processing of Media

Temple is a member of the Media Interface and Network Design (M.I.N.D.) Labs, a networked consortium of ten labs located in seven countries spanning universities in the United States and Europe. The labs conduct research in human-computer interaction, communication, and virtual environment design. Temple's Lab, directed by Matthew Lombard with Andrew Mendelson and Timo Saari, focuses on the nature and consequences of mediated experiences. In one current project, Matthew Lombard and several students are using an online database to examine portrayals in film, television and other media of technologies that evoke telepresence - a sense of "being there" in a virtual or media environment, or more generally, an "illusion of nonmediation" - to better understand the types of technologies, experiences and applications that people want and fear and ethical issues raised by such technologies.