Faculty
Debra Burns Melican, Visiting Lecturer
Debra Burns Melican is currently a visiting lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. Her interest is in political communication, media effects, and critical race theory, with a special emphasis on race and the news. She is first author of "News on the Net: Credibility, Selective Exposure, and Racial Prejudice" in the April 2008 issue of Communication Research. Debbie's dissertation, Race in the Floodwaters: Deconstructing Theories of White Racial Attitudes and Constructing News Coverage of Hurricane Katrina, takes the study of race and media in a new direction by combining multiple research methods and theoretical traditions. The dissertation consists of three interrelated studies that investigate the persistence and impact of racialized news frames. Using theories from social science and critical race theory, the dissertation employs textual analysis, quantitative content analysis, and an experiment. Her goal is to map the intersection of social science and whiteness to increase understanding about the relationship between news and racial attitudes. She currently teaches Introduction to Communication, Small Group Communication, and History of Television. For Spring 2009, Debbie teaches Research Methods and Writing and an advanced topics course on the race and media.
- PhD Candidate, Department of Communication Studies, U. of Michigan
- Email: dmelican [at] uic [dot] edu
- Phone: 312.413.2128
1007 W Harrison Street, Behavioral Sciences Building 1140, MC132 Chicago IL 60607 | Phone: 312-996-3187 | Fax: 312-413-2125
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