Amy Propen is an Associate Professor of Digital and Multimodal Writing in the Writing Program. Her research interests include visual and material rhetorics, environmental and sustainability rhetorics, digital and posthuman rhetorics, animal studies, human geography, critical cartographies, and critical GIS. She is particularly interested in the connections between multimodal technologies, the posthuman, and environmental and marine species conservation.
Rita Raley is a Professor in the Department of English, where she serves as co-director of the Literature and Culture of Information specialization. She is the author of Tactical Media and has more recently published articles on digital poetics, dataveillance, and interventionist art practices. She co-edited a journal issue on "securing with algorithms" and writing about algorithmic translations.
Dr. Muniba Saleem is an associate professor in the Department of Communication. Dr. Saleem studies how media affects interpersonal and intergroup relations between racial, ethnic, and religious groups. Current work examines the social psychological antecedents of hate speech on social media sites as well as the consequences of being exposed to such speech for minoritized groups. Other work examines how and why minoritized members use social media for collective action.
Greg Siegel is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He is the author of Forensic Media: Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity (Duke University Press). His research interests include Media History, Cultural Theory, Science and Technology Studies, Media Theory, Critical Theory, and Sound Studies.
Eric R.A.N. Smith is a Professor of Political Science. Dr. Smith's research focuses on public opinion, elections, and environmental politics. In the area of environmental politics, he has been examining public opinion toward offshore oil development and nuclear power.
Melissa Smith is a family medicine physician who has worked in poor communities in the US and Central America providing medical care and developing training programs for community health workers and midwives. Dr. Smith is the Director of Health Equity Initiatives at UC Santa Barbara, and Deputy Director of Education and Training for the UC Global Health Institute's Women's Health Gender and Empowerment Center of Expertise.
Cynthia Stohl is Professor in the Department of Communication, a Fellow and Past President of the International Communication Association, and a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association. A leading expert in globalization, networks, and organizational processes, her most recent work addresses global organizing, collective action, and corporate social responsibility in the digital media environment. In 2012 she received the Outstanding Book award for Collective Action in Organizations: Interaction and Engagement in an Era of Technological Change (co-authored with UCSB Professors Flanagin and Bimber).