Center for Communication, Culture, and Change
The Center for Communication, Culture, and Change focuses on promoting positive social change through communication research, practice, and evaluation. The Center serves as a valuable venue benefiting students and faculty through collaborative and compelling scholarly and creative projects that address our contemporary challenges.
This Center’s central achievement is supporting faculty and graduate student scholarly and creative work in pursuit of valuable social change. This focus stems from the premise that communication is a transformative practice and a powerful tool for catalyzing positive social change. The mission of the Center’s research and creative portfolio is to advance our collective field of Communication by contributing theory-based, original, complex, socially relevant, and impactful creative activity and research.
Past Projects
AI technologies now play various communicator roles, from content producers (e.g., automated news generation) to interpersonal interlocutors (e.g., voice assistants). However, the “black-box” nature of AI systems has raised serious concerns, especially when they are used to automate important decisions in domains such as health, finance, and criminal justice. In the field of Explainable AI (XAI), researchers have strived to identify technical solutions to improve the transparency of AI decisions. Focusing on the potential of XAI for raising awareness of algorithmic bias, this study presents one of the earliest empirical efforts on examining whether the state-of-the-art XAI approaches can effectively improve user understanding of AI decisions and help users identify potential biases in the AI systems.
“Correspondence” is a feature-length narrative film co-produced between the University of Miami and Fudan University in Shanghai, exploring themes of cultural exchange and social inclusion. The story follows Kendrick, an African American novelist in Shanghai, and Kay, an Asian American writer in Miami, as they exchange letters and confront challenges, from family pressures to career struggles, leading them to question their lives and relationships. The film emerged from a broader initiative utilizing virtual collaboration techniques like Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) and Globally Networked Learning (GNL). These methods enabled international teamwork between students, even amid the pandemic, fostering cross-cultural understanding.
Cyberbullying involves the intentional and repeated harm of victims through the sending or posting of hurtful content via electronic devices. Alarmingly, over 20% of tweens (aged 9 to 12) are exposed to cyberbullying, with 15% of young victims unlikely to report the issue to peers, family, or adults. To address this, Cartoon Network has, for many years, launched anti-cyberbullying programs in collaboration with various schools and organizations. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of these Cartoon Network anti-cyberbullying materials in shaping children’s attitudes and intentions regarding cyberbullying.
There is a strong link between HIV and maternal health, with higher HIV rates correlating to increased maternal mortality. HIV-infected women face a 2 to 8 times higher risk of death and pregnancy complications. Indigenous Mayan women in Guatemala are particularly vulnerable due to partner migration and traditional gender roles. Dr. Orrego’s research in Santiago Atitlán suggests adapting SEPA, a proven HIV intervention, to the local Mayan culture. Integrating SEPA into comadrona (traditional birth attendants) training, alongside HIV testing, could improve reproductive health and reduce HIV risk among indigenous women.