Collaboration Unlocks Advances in Communication

When researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication designed a pediatric COVID-19 vaccination campaign using augmented reality posters, they got feedback from some expert partners — community health ambassadors — before the launch.

Good thing, too. “They made many changes,” says Andy S.L. Tan, director of Annenberg’s Health Communication & Equity Lab and a co-investigator on the Philly CEAL (Community Engagement Alliance) project that included working with colleagues in the Schools of Nursing and Medicine and the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. The community members emphasized that if the campaign just wagged a finger at them, no one would pay attention. “We reshaped the narrative. The co-design really paid off in terms of receptivity to this message among Philadelphia parents.”

The community partners also proved critical advocates. “There’s a trust factor,” Teresa Dooley, one of the Penn-trained health ambassadors, says, adding that communities of color like her West Oak Lane neighborhood were suspicious of the quick-to-market COVID-19 vaccine. “If somebody is coming from Penn, of course they’re giving information that’s in favor of it. It’s different when a neighbor is talking about it.”

Philly CEAL is just one of the many dozens of alliances that drive the study and practice of the multi-faceted Communication field at Penn Annenberg. Scholarship and research are at the center of Annenberg’s work. Faculty, students, and researchers use multiple methods, mediums, and platforms to engage with global events and theoretical questions. Whether they are shaping the norms around vaccines, studying people’s political views and preferences, or quantifying the extent of gender bias online, the Annenberg community is leading the understanding of important questions and pressing issues in our society with other Penn schools, with universities around the country and world, and with industry.

“Communication has always been interdisciplinary and collaborative,” Annenberg Dean Sarah Banet-Weiser says. “It’s not just about co-authoring. It’s about actually engaging with people who have different forms of expertise and adding your expertise so that you have a richer and more capacious understanding of the social or communication issue that’s being studied.”

Before her deanship, Banet-Weiser, herself, held the first-ever joint appointment at Annenberg, while on the faculty of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and continues to direct the first- of-its-kind Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication, which unites the research of the two schools to revolutionize the role of communication in addressing complex issues.

“It is about refusing provinciality...The University at large recognizes that research is best when collaborative.” – Sarah Banet-Weiser

To that end, Annenberg’s Center for Media at Risk has joined with the Universidade Católica Portuguesa to hold the Lisbon Winter School for the Study of Communication. Started in 2020, the school brings together doctoral students and early-career researchers from around the world to present on themes such as this year’s [2024] “Media and Ambivalence.” The Center also has a collaboration with the International Communication Association, through which a media practitioner attends and presents at the yearly conference. Annenberg’s Media, Inequality & Change Center (MIC), begun in 2018, works with Rutgers University and community activists to support policy interventions, address structural inequalities, and produce research. In one project, MIC, along with Pennsylvania State University’s College of Communications, are using research, advocacy, and community input to expand broadband access to underserved communities in the state, and ultimately, the nation. 

One of Annenberg’s newest joint efforts is the Center for Media, Technology, and Democracy. Launched with the help of Knight Foundation, the Center includes collaboration with the School of Engineering and Applied Science, where it’s housed; the Wharton School; the School of Arts & Sciences; the School of Social Policy & Practice; Penn Carey Law, and the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC). One aim is to create a series of public-facing “dashboards” that combine artificial intelligence (AI) annotations from generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) with high-quality data sets on media consumption and media bias from industry partners such as Nielsen and PeakMetrics, says Duncan Watts, co-principal investigator and founding director of Penn’s Computational Social Science Lab. The hope, he says, is that AI analysis of large data sets, along with behavioral experiments, will uncover the causes and consequences of misinformation.

“There are very good people across all of these schools who work on similar problems, but they don’t always talk to each other,” he says. When interaction occurs, benefits accrue, he adds. “Annenberg Ph.D. students know different things from computer science Ph.D. students. Together, they can work on projects that none of them would be able to do on their own.”

Perhaps no entity facilitates alliances more than APPC — which supports numerous collaborative efforts: a virtual driving assessment for teens with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; an election survey directed by political science professor Matthew Levendusky that led to the 2023 book Democracy Amid Crises, a work of the Annenberg Institutions of Democracy Collaborative of 11 scholars across seven universities; the work of climate scientist Michael E. Mann, inaugural director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, and more. APPC also runs the Civics Renewal Network, the largest consortium of civics organizations, to help teachers educate good citizens through a searchable database of resources.

“The policy center is set up to create cross-campus collaboration on consequential issues that will advance the public good,” APPC Director Kathleen Hall Jamieson says. “Part of our goal is to increase the likelihood that scholars who work in communication are at the table when their voices will benefit the work of others and when the knowledge others have will benefit the work of our scholars.”

Annenberg also is establishing an international footprint. In March [2024], Annenberg’s Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) joined with the University of Hyderabad to pilot a week-long initiative that brought together in New Delhi doctoral communication students and scholars from Annenberg and around India for lectures and site visits, including to a community library and cricket match. The plan is to establish a bi-annual program housed at Penn’s Institute for the Advanced Study of India in Delhi, says Aswin Punathambekar, CARGC’s director.

“This is a modest effort to internationalize the field” he says. “In this moment, when there’s so much political suspicion of global connections, migration, refugee communities, I think it’s important to create a program that supports this kind of dialogue and exchange.”

Sim Gill, a third-year doctoral student from London, says she found the experience inspiring even though lectures did not directly pertain to her dissertation topic on the different ways violence against women and girls is communicated.

But then again, that’s how collaboration works.

“That’s the true gift of being in a room full of scholars,” Gill says. "You spark ideas, sit in quiet reflection, and navigate the boundless perspectives that redefine the way we understand the world."

“In these moments, new connections and ways of moving through spaces are formed, linking conversations and realizing the deeper potential that drives our collective transformation.” – Sim Gill