Three members of the Undergraduate Committee, Tracy Lucht (chair), Pauli Escobedo, and Beth Haag, were appointed as members of a diversity subcommittee in Fall 2016. The subcommittee was created in 2010. The list below serves as a report of GSJC diversity-related activities and accomplishments during the 2016–17 academic year.
**Awards and Recognitions**
* Assistant Professor Tracy Lucht and Assistant Professor Amy Erica Smith (Department of Political Science) were awarded a $5,000 Women’s and Diversity Grant from ISU in 2016 to host the on-campus workshop “Strategies for Being Productive and Getting Recognized: Strengthening the Ranks of Women Faculty at ISU.” The workshop—led by Dr. Joy Gaston Gayles of the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity—was co-sponsored by GSJC, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, ISU’s ADVANCE, the Department of Political Science, and the Department of Computer Science.
* Dr. Lucht and former Greenlee master’s student Kelsey Batschelet won second place in the 2016 AEJMC History Division faculty paper competition for “ ‘They Couldn’t Bring Me Down’: Gender and Agency in the Careers of Midwestern Women Broadcasters.”
**Scholarship and Outreach – Research Presentations, Publications, Panels, Media Coverage**
* Associate Professor Joel Geske published the article “Riot vs. Revelry: News Bias Through Visual Media” in Teaching Media Quarterly Volume 4, No. 1: Teaching Black Lives Matter: Media, Race and Social Movements.
* Dr. Geske delivered an invited presentation at the 2016 AEJMC convention as a member of a panel on “Teaching LGBTQ Issues in the Bible Belt.” At the same conference, Dr. Geske moderated a panel on “Minnesota, the Midwest and the LGBTQ Movement.”
* Assistant Professor Tracy Lucht gave an invited presentation on “Women of the Airwaves: Midwestern Trailblazers in Broadcasting History” at the 2016 AEJMC convention.
* Dr. Lucht gave a presentation titled “Race, Religion, and Rights: Otherness Gone Mad,” at Mad Men: the Conference in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. At the same conference, Dr. Lucht and co-author Jane Marcellus presented their paper “ ‘Enchanted Relationships’ and Corporate Culture: Symbolic Violence Against the Women of Mad Men.”
* The Greenlee School sponsored a public screening of Project Enye (ñ): A Voice for First–Generation Latinos between Two Worlds, on October 13, 2016.
* Dr. Lucht’s lecture “Stunt Reporters and Sob Sisters: Women Journalists at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” appeared on C-SPAN’s American History TV in January 2017.
* The Greenlee School was a co-sponsor of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s public lecture “A Deeper Black: Race in America” on January 30, 2017.
* Greenlee is partnering with the ISU 4U Promise program. The goal of the promise program is to promote college-going among students at Des Moines’ King and Moulton elementary schools. Students who complete fifth grade at King or Moulton elementary school will be eligible for tuition awards to Iowa State University. The goal of the school’s partnership with the program is to promote careers in advertising, journalism and mass communication and public relations and to help Iowa State’s recruitment of underrepresented students. The program dates are February 16 and March 9.
* Dr. Michael Bugeja’s article “The Fuss,” about trigger warnings and microaggressions, was published by Inside Higher Ed. His presentation on the same topic was accepted for Iowa State’s iScore conference on March 1.
* In March, Greenlee will host Dr. Earnest Perry for a Research Friday. During his time at ISU, he will speak about his latest research on “Teaching History in the Age of Black Lives Matter: Embracing the Narratives of the Long Struggle for Civil Rights.”
* Tracy Lucht and former master’s student Chunyu Zhang published their article “‘Television’s Closet Revolutionary’: Mary Jane Odell and Her Fight for Public Affairs Broadcasting” in the spring 2017 issue of American Journalism.
* Dr. Lucht was invited to write a sidebar about “The Radio Homemakers”—a unique role in broadcasting that women created for themselves when other positions were not available to them—for the 10th edition of The History of Media in America, the leading textbook in U.S. journalism history.
* Dr. Lucht wrote two diversity-related articles for Clio, the newsletter of AEJMC’s History Division: “Race, Representation, and the Practice of Journalism” and “Research Meets Recent Events: Harassment a Part of Women’s History in Broadcasting.”
* In April, Dr. Bugeja will visit the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa to give a workshop to faculty there on diversity and inclusion.
* The Greenlee School will host journalist Joe Starita on campus in spring 2017. Starita has written three narrative non-fiction books about Native Americans, one nominated for a Pulitzer in history. His most recent book, A Warrior of the People, details Susan La Flesche, a Native woman from the Nebraska/Iowa area who was the first Native woman to complete medical school. He will give a campus-wide lecture, speak to JLMC classes, and attend a luncheon for Greenlee faculty, staff, and students.
**Service**
* Associate Professor Joel Geske serves on Steering Committee for the LGBT Faculty/Staff Association.
* Dr. Geske also serves on Women’s and Gender Studies Faculty Steering Committee.
**Teaching, Mentorship, and Advising**
* Jovan Johnson graduated with his master’s degree in May 2016 after successfully defending his thesis, “The ‘Figuring World of Blackness’ Negotiated through Rap Music.” With Associate Professor Joel Geske serving as major professor, the study looked at how young Black males in the state of Iowa construct their blackness in an environment where Blackness is lost in a White dominant space.
* Assistant Professor Tracy Lucht uses the lectures program at ISU to introduce her JLMC 201 students to diverse perspectives and ideas. In spring 2017, she assigned students to cover Ta-Nehisi Coates’s lecture on race and racism in America. In addition, she invited author Ryan Berg to talk with JLMC 201 students about his work and writing on the issue of LGBTQ homelessness.
* In JLMC 201, lecturer Gary Sawyer requires students to interview people who don’t look like they do. In all of his courses, Sawyer lectures on diversity and the importance of diversity to business decisions in addition to the reporting/writing process.
* In lecturer Lisa Munger Oakes’s JLMC 202 class, students must write at least one diversity-related story and one “voice to the voiceless” story on their beats. Munger Oakes also invites Assistant Dean of Students/Director of Multicultural Student Affairs Kenyatta Shamburger to her classes each term to lead an identity exercise that exposes implicit bias and to discuss how the findings apply to students’ reporting and writing.
* In Gary Sawyer’s JLMC 202 class, he emphasizes the importance of having diverse sources and talking to communities that are underrepresented and may not have the skills/knowledge to get media coverage. As one of their beat stories, students are required to write about a community that doesn’t usually get covered.
* In JLMC 301, lecturer Bret Voorhees has made Diversity and Inclusion the “client” of his research course. In fall 2016, the class worked with the Iowa State Daily and Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion Reginald Stewart’s new office to assess the current “temperature” of diversity discussions on campus. The class proposed ways to present and message this important issue; the spring 2017 class is continuing this work.
* Lisa Munger Oakes’s new course, JLMC 414x: Digital Newsroom: Depth Reporting, will produce a half-semester-long project centered on the theme of giving “voice to the voiceless.”
* Associate Professor Dennis Chamberlin uses his study abroad courses—and the feelings of otherness his American students experience in a foreign country—as an opportunity to discuss the experiences and perspectives of non-majority students on ISU’s campus.
* Due to popularity and enrollment in JLMC 477: Ethnicity, Gender, Class and the Media, the School added a second section of the class.
* Lecturer Michael Wigton teaches all of his advertising classes about the diversity of audiences. He covers different target audiences for marketing by age, sex, gender, ethnicity, beliefs, etc. He also discusses how messaging impacts the behaviors/attitudes of different audiences and how advertisers have an ethical obligation to beware of consciously or unconsciously perpetuating stereotypes.
* In the spring section of ADVRT 436, Michael Wigton led a discussion among his American and international students about advertising and communication strategies in different cultures.
**Hiring and Fundraising**
* GSJC hired its first female director in Dr. Angela Powers, who will join the School on July 1 from Kansas State University. During the search, the committee emphasized the importance of diversity within the pool and during interviews with the candidates.