Students from University of Illinois and Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone won first place in the 2024 Illinois Broadcasters Association Student Silver Dome Award for Television Photojournalism.
Illinois journalism students Maggie Knutte, Faith Lee, Nour Longi, Piper Pascarella, and Stephanie Wayda, and agricultural communications student Elena Cleary, along with Fourah Bay College broadcast journalism students, were selected for their entry “The Women of Uman Tok Reframe Menstruation in Sierra Leone.”
I interrogate the politics of popular cultures hiding under the cloak of spectacular glitz, through interdisciplinary approaches within cultural studies. My work invites the readers to (re)visit the power relations of languages in contemporary cinema and the pop music industry or to explore a complicated ecosystem of female fandom.
From Seoul, where I completed a four-year BA program in Journalism and Communications in just three years, graduating summa cum laude, via London, where I obtained my MA degree in Gender, Media and Culture with Distinction at Goldsmiths, University of London, to Urbana-Champaign, my current home in which I pursue my PhD in media studies, I have been traveling around the world to refine my insights in the historical and geopolitical understanding of cultural phenomena.
Recent Publications/Presentations
Kang, Youngin. Forthcoming. “The Skin Heard Yellow: Raciolinguistic analysis of K-pop “girl idols” within (post)colonial power dynamics.” In A World of Contradictions: Culture and Identity in the Roiling of Globalization, edited by Cameron McCarthy, Warren Crichlow, Theodora Kourkoulou, Manuel Pérez Tronconso, and Adrian Wong. Common Ground Research Networks.
Kang, Youngin. “Cultural Politics Surrounding the “Girl Idols” of the K-pop Industry.” Presented at Left Undone: The Union for Democratic Communications 2023 Conference, Philadelphia, PA, October 14, 2023.
Kang, Youngin. 2022. “Beyond the Layout: Reading South Korean Animations as Affective-Performative Assemblages.” Feminist Media Studies 22 (8): 1885–1901. doi:10.1080/14680777.2021.1939401. (Published online: June 15, 2021)
Courses Taught
MACS 100: Introduction to Popular TV and Movies
MACS 101: Introduction to Media Studies
Included on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent: Fall 2024 (MACS 101), Spring 2024 (MACS 101), Fall 2023 (MACS 101), and Spring 2022 (MACS 100).
Awards and Honors
Travel and Research Grant from Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies 2023
Korean Government Scholarship Program for Study Overseas 2017
What Most People Don’t Know about Me
I love dancing secretly, and silently, alone in my room with headphones on.
Jiwon’s research interests broadly encompass transnational and feminist STS, AI ethics and governance, Asian technocultures, and human-machine communication. Her current projects delve into AI governance and the shifting notions of intimacy and creativity shaped by AI in South Korea, as well as the dynamics of Western technological influence and forms of resistance within East Asian spaces. Rooted in critical examinations of historical and contemporary narratives, her research interrogates the lasting impacts of colonialism, capitalism, and liberal humanism and how these forces both shape and are shaped by hyperproductionist technocultural developments in East Asia.
Jiwon received her M.A. in Communication from Seoul National University and B.S. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University.
Recent Publications/Presentations
Oh, J. J. (2025). Navigating Gendered Anthropomorphism in AI Ethics: The Case of Lee Luda in South Korea. In 58th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). https://hdl.handle.net/10125/109659.
“Them that Fabricate: Interpretations of Conservative Religions in Independent Film”, Console-ing Passions International Conference. Bloomington, IN. June, 2024
“Mapping Found Footage Tropes in the True Crime Genre”, Popular Culture Association National Conference. Chicago, IL. March, 2024.
Courses Taught
MACS 101 Introduction to Media
MACS 100 Introduction to Popular TV & Movies
Academic Roles
Assistant at The Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies
Awards and Honors
University of Illinois List of Teachers Ranked Excellent (2022-2024)
Michael Schoenecke Travel Grant for Graduate Students (2024, 2025)
R Ray, S Bhalla, H Taneja. (2025). Partisan news users in the United States and India on either side seldom use fact checkers. Journal of Communication, https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaf018
Bhalla, S., Nelson, M. R., & Spikes, M. (2025). Classroom contexts: Teachers talk teaching media literacy. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 17(2), 37-52. https://doi.org/10.23860/JMLE-2025-17-2-3
Bhalla, S., Ray, R., & Taneja, H. (2024). When news is entertainment: explaining the persistence of misinformation through the information environment. Information Communication & Society, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2024.2406819
Khan, A., S Natarajan, S Bhalla, Climate Strikes in Millennial India: Social Capital and “On-Ground” Networks in Digital-First Movements, Communication, Culture and Critique, Volume 14, Issue 3, September 2021, Pages 518–523, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcab035
Namita is a PhD student at the Institute of Communications Research, with an interest in examining urban technologies and platform economies in South Asia. She is particularly interested in the everyday functioning of these technologies in relation to questions of class, gender and caste.
She has a BA and MA in English-language literature from Lady Shri Ram College for Women (India) and Shiv Nadar University (India) respectively.
Recent Publications/Presentations
Gupta, N. “Gated Bodies: Analyzing Class Hierarchies and Surveillance Technologies in Indian Residential Communities” Annual Conference on South Asia. University of Wisconsin: Madison. November 2024.
Kulkarni, V., Gupta, N., & Panicker, A. (2024). Creating ‘safe’ spaces through exclusionary boundaries: Examining employers’ treatment of domestic workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in India. Human Relations, https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267241275864
Gupta, N. “The Many Faces of the Gendered Nation: A Study of the Representation of Women in Amul’s Popular Media Content.” Annual Conference of Popular Culture Association. March 2024.
Gupta, N. “Amul Girl’s India: Constructing a National Memory in Advertisements.” International Association for Media and Communication Research Annual Conference. June 2023.
Kulkarni, V., Gupta, N. (Presenter), & K.B. Neog. “Hurt Sentiments or Misogyny?: Reading Partisan News Coverage of Agrima Joshua’s ‘Offensive’ Joke”. International Communication Association Annual Conference 2023. May 2023.
Courses Taught
MACS 100: Intro to Popular TV & Movies (Fall 2023-Spring 2025)
I am interested in the intersection between games, culture, and the representation of physical space. Focusing primarily on games from Japan, I seek to make connections between games and culture while also considering how physical space is reproduced in the games’ virtual worlds. I am also interested in the role of controls in the video game experience.
Yiran Gao is a doctoral student at the Institute of Communications Research. Her interdisciplinary research interests lie at the intersection of media studies, critical cultural studies, science and technology studies, and global studies. Her current research focuses on the roles and the impact of digital media on the formation of digital public sphere at a transnational level. She has presented her works at the top conferences in the fields, including International Communication Association (ICA), International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), and Cultural Studies Association (CSA).
As a Teaching Assistant in the Department of Media & Cinema Studies, Yiran has consistently been ranked as excellent by her students, based on Instructor and Course Evaluation System (ICES), and received the 2022 Teaching Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from the College of Media.
Academic Roles
Teaching Assistant
What Most People Don’t Know about Me
I am obsessed with collecting creative fridge magnets when traveling, one magnet a place.
I am interested in the history of communication/media technologies; media and space, race and media, resistance and social movements; media policies and critical information studies. I am intrigued by how media affect cultural changes in the public sphere, build cultural citizenship and (re)produce frameworks of everyday life. I am driven by questions of “who has the power?”; “how power is manifested” through mediated systems and how the trajectory of (inter)national cultural, economic, political, technological forces get shaped by global communication network.
Research Keywords
Media history, space, social movements, policy, public sphere, critical theory, information studies
What Most People Don’t Know about Me
I am obsessed with French impressionist painters; especially Monet and Renoir.
Media Career Services is holding its first annual Media Career Week, featuring workshops, guest speakers, and media professionals offering helpful insights to prepare College of Media students for a campuswide career fair as well as their post-graduation career.
Media Career Services hosts a panel with recruiters.
Media Career Week will kick off Monday, Feb. 24, and run through Thursday, Feb. 27, culminating with the Hire Illini Career and Internship Fair, which typically attracts hundreds of employers recruiting for a wide range of jobs and internships. The event is organized by The Career Center on campus and held at the Illini Union.
Daniel Almanza, assistant director of Media Career Services, said he wanted to try something new this year, taking events that would normally be held throughout the academic semester and planning them during the same week to build momentum leading up to the main career fair held every spring at the University of Illinois.
“What I had in mind was to offer different workshops, different opportunities for students to be able to prep for the Hire Illini Career and Internship Fair, but also to start thinking about what they want to potentially do as a career,” Almanza said.
Media Career Services is partnering with other units on campus to put on daily events throughout Media Career Week, including The Career Center, the Media James Scholar Program, the Richard and Leslie Frank Center for Leadership and Innovation in Media, and the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies.
Events include resume reviews with local professionals, student internship panel, an alumni career night, and more.
Students are encouraged to self-select which events they attend, based on their interests and needs, whether it’s talking tips, networking opportunities, or learning more about a specific field in the media industry.
“It’s really about helping students prepare for their future career and attending events they think are going to help them ultimately at the career fair,” he said.
Almanza, who has led Media Career Services for more than three years, recently shared some of his career advice in Getting from College to Career by Lindsey Pollak.
In the book, Almanza highlights webinar tips, provides interview recommendations, and suggests how to showcase previous experiences and skills.
Almanza hopes the inaugural Media Career Week will help Media students become fully equipped to succeed at the annual Hire Illini and Internship Fair.
“I’m excited to do this, to see how well it works and really pilot [this program] and see if students enjoy a condensed week of professional development,” he said.
