A Dedicated Team of Urban Communication Experts

Lolly Bowean is a Program Officer for Journalism with the Creativity and Free Expression Team at the Ford Foundation. She was previously a Program Officer for Media & Storytelling at the Field Foundation. Before joining Field, she was a general assignment reporter at the Chicago Tribune for more than 15 years where she had a particular focus on urban affairs, youth culture, housing, minority communities and government relations. She wrote primarily about Chicago’s unique African-American community and, in recent years, the development of the Obama Presidential Center. During her tenure, she covered the death of Nelson Mandela, how violence was lived in troubled neighborhoods, and the 2008 election and inauguration of President Barack Obama. Most recently, she wrote about the election of Chicago’s first African-American woman Mayor, Lori Lightfoot. In addition, she’s covered Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the last gathering of the original Tuskegee Airmen. Before joining the Chicago Tribune, Bowean covered suburban crime, government and environmental issues for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. She has been published in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Lenny Letter and Longreads. She has served as a contributing instructor for the Poynter Institute and lectured at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and is the former program officer for the Chicago Headline Club. She was a 2017 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and is a Studs Terkel Award winner. In 2019 she became the first African-American awarded the Gene Burd Urban Journalism Award. She is a Pulitzer prize nominated writer who lives on the South Side of Chicago. Find her on Twitter @lollybowean

Professor in the of Department of Journalism/Media Studies, School of Communication, Hofstra University. She is an attorney, editor of the Free Speech Yearbook, and Series editor of the Communication and Law series for Hampton Press. She is the author and editor of 6 books and over 85 articles and book chapters including Voices in the Street: Gender, Media and Public Space and two editions of Real Law @ Virtual Space: The Regulation of Cyberspace (1999, 2005) with Gary Gumpert. She is a recipient of the Franklyn S. Haiman Award for distinguished scholarship in freedom of expression. Her work examines the relationship between media technology and human factors, particularly as viewed from a legal perspective. She is a partner in Communication Landscapers, a consulting firm.  Susan Drucker is Secretary Treasurer of the Urban Communications Foundation Board. 

Erik Garrett is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies at Duquesne University.  He received a dual doctorate in philosophy and communication from Purdue University.  His books and monographs include Why do we go to the zoo? Communication, animals, and the cultural-historical experience of zoos and El barrio de la colina:  Dos estudios de fenomenologia urbana. He currently is working on a book about urban phenomenology and communication.  Explorations in Media Ecology, Atlantic Journal of Communication, Human Studies, and Journal of Communication, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Environmental Communication, and Environmental Communication Research are the different journals where he has published articles.  He is chair of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences and the North American Levinas Society as well as the director of Duquesne University’s Center for Interpretative and Qualitative Research.

Professor in the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics. She has conducted cross-national comparative research across Europe and trans-urban research in American and European cities. Her book Diaspora, Identity and the Media: Diasporic Transnationalism and Mediated Spatialities(Hampton Press, 2006) draws from ethnographic research in London and New York City and the ways in which ethnic identities are constructed in multicultural neighbourhoods. Her recent book Media and the City: Cosmopolitanism and Difference (Polity, 2013) reflects on the different and competing forms of cosmopolitanism that emerge at the meeting of media and the city, especially in the context of the global city. She has also co-edited the collection Transnational Lives and the Media: Re-imagining Diasporas (with O.Bailey and R.Haridranath, 2007, Palgrave) and has edited Gender, Migration and the Media (Routledge, 2012). Her articles have been published in sociological, cultural studies, and media and communications journals.  

Professor, College of Communication, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. He leads two research units: Urban Socio-Spatial Informatics Center (USSI) and Urban Communication Lab (UCL). Before joining the faculty at Yonsei, he was on the faculty at the University of Iowa and the University of Alabama. He earned a doctoral degree from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at University of Southern California . For the last 15 years, his research program has been built around three key areas: urban communication, new media technology, and public health/risk. He has published more than 40 academic papers in prestigious journals such as Communication Research, Human Communication Research, Communication Theory, Political Communication,  and New Media & Society 

Professor of Media and Communications, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Australia. He is one of the founders of the Research Unit for Public Cultures which fosters interdisciplinary research at the nexus of digital media, contemporary art, urbanism, and social theory.His research explores the social effects of media technologies, with particular attention to their impact on the social relations of space and time, the formation of identity, and the functioning of contemporary cities. Scott is the author of Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera (1998), The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space (2008), which won the 2009 Jane Jacobs Publication Award offered by the Urban Communication Foundation, Geomedia: Networked Cities and the Future of Public Space (2016), and most recently Art Seen Under Digital Light: Photography, The Image, and the Aesthetics of Data (2018). The Media City has been translated into Chinese (2011, 2014) and Russian (2014) and Geomedia has been translated into Russian (2018) and Chinese (2019). 

 Peter Haratonik currently teaches part-time in the School of Media Studies at The New School after retiring as a professor  He was a founding member of the School of Media Studies and had served as the school’s head for many years. He also teaches part-time at The School of The Art Institute in Chicago. He has created new programs and taught at Antioch College, Hofstra University, and New York University. He has served as a Fellow at The Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College and as a consultant for InHolland University, Rotterdam, and the Dublin Institute of Technology. He also serves as a consultant for Objective Focus, an education consulting firm. His most recent published research has been on the role of urban historic districts as participatory communication spaces. 

Emeritus Professor of Communication at Queens College of the City University of New York and co-founder of Communication Landscapers, a consulting firm. His primary research focused on the nexus of communication technology and social relationships, particularly looking at urban and suburban development, the alteration of public space, and the changing nature of community. Some of his noteworthy and early publications include: “Talking Tombstones and Other Tales of the Media Age” (1987); “Inter/Media: Interpersonal Communication in a Media Age” (1979); and “The Zoning of Social Interaction” (1991). Among his recent articles were “Communicative Cities“ (2008); “Public Space Transformed: Digital Connectivity and Urban Spaces” (2010); The Urban Communication Infrastructure: Global Connection and Local Detachment” (2010); and “New York as Global City and Local Community: The Paradigm of Urban Communication“ (2011). Gary Gumpert was the Founder and President Emeritus of the Urban Communications Foundation.