Centers and Institutes

At the UT College of Communication

by Lisa Crider

Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas

Rosental Alves believes democracy in Latin America could not flourish without a free press, a fact he has learned the hard way, watching friends and colleagues perish while fighting for democracy in the area.

The journalism professor, director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, is passionate about giving journalists and organizations the tools they need to bring press freedom to a region where it has remained elusive.

Alves started the Knight Center on June 1, 2002. One day later, journalist Tim Lopes, a friend and colleague of Alves’ in Rio de Janeiro, disappeared and was later killed by drug lords. Alves was chilled to realize the date was 26 years to the day investigative journalist Don Bolles was fatally wounded by a car bomb in Phoenix, Ariz., as he worked on a story about organized crime.

“I was shocked. I worked with Tim and was starting the Knight Center at that moment,” he says somberly in his fifth floor office in the College. “The killing of my friends motivated me to start an Investigative Reporters and Editors organization in Brazil.”

At the request of Alves, IRE members went to Brazil in 2002 and formed the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism.

Immensely popular with journalism faculty members, Alves often masks his intellect and journalistic standing worldwide with a wicked sense of humor and acerbic comments. But the goal of improving the state of journalism in the Americas is a deadly serious mission for the 56-year-old former executive editor of Jornal de Brasil.

Alves is aware Latin America has struggled to consolidate democracy over the years partially due to a climate of revolutions, dictatorships and censorship. “Democracy is still under construction,” he admits.

The Knight Center at UT, created in 2002 through a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, teaches journalists the techniques and practices of digital journalism, while serving as an incubator for new journalism organizations.

Being in the vanguard of such a movement has risks, as Alves well knows. The Committee to Protect Journalists still reports dozens of murders of working journalists each year — many in Latin America. The Knight Center has become a source of support, providing both resources and training to working journalists, while monitoring assaults and violence on press freedom.

The center’s trilingual website monitors and archives daily journalism news, and is searchable by country or keyword, serving as a resource to journalists, editors and scholars.

The center also conducts several professional training programs that are elevating the craft of journalism throughout the Americas:

Distance Training A trilingual (English, Portuguese and Spanish), multi-media online curriculum for professional journalists in Latin America and the Caribbean. More than 1,000 journalists since 2003 have taken the course offerings, which include The Role of the Editor, Mathematics for Journalists, Investigative Reporting, Covering Armed Conflicts, Computer Assisted Reporting, Election Coverage and Democracy and Journalism Ethics.

Professional Workshops Training seminars held in various Latin American and Caribbean countries, are offered in partnership with local journalism organizations. Topics have included such subjects as election coverage, the use of the federal transparency law in Mexico, coverage of sustainable development and narrative radio journalism techniques.

In addition, seminars have studied the coverage of local and regional elections, computer-assisted reporting and digital journalism.

Austin Forum on Journalism in the Americas An annual conference and permanent network of organizations dedicated to journalism training and press freedom in Latin America and the Caribbean, the annual Austin Forum attracts representatives of more than 30 organizations from throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. All are focused on digital journalism and the challenges of training Latin American journalists to become technologically proficient.

The forum has become a permanent network of associations that collaborate throughout the year on concrete activities to improve the quality of journalism in the Americas.

Learn more about the Knight Center

Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Participation

Why don’t Americans vote?

A good question. Voting statistics in the United States are dismal. While about 70 percent of U.S. citizens are registered, barely 54 percent actually make it to the polls on election day.

Since 1960, voter turnout has been steadily declining in all established democracies, with the trend especially steep in America — and the sharpest decrease among younger American voters. Political scientists believe a growing political cynicism and disaffection in the U.S. is largely to blame.

The non-partisan Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Participation, established in 2000 to combat growing cynicism, uses applied research to understand the roots of the problem and innovative outreach programs targeted to young Americans.

Their goal? To increase the number of voters and make better citizens.

The payoff is huge – research has shown that a young voter will continue to vote throughout their life. And more voters equal a more robust democracy. Learn more at the Annette Strauss Institute's web site.

Innovative Outreach

The Institute believes in starting early. Each year they take their acclaimed Speak Up! Speak Out! program into central Texas schools, teaching hundreds of teens teamwork and community empowerment skills. Teens work in small teams to find creative solutions to problems in their local communities, creating a legacy of young citizens equipped with the tools to affect change in their own backyard and a deep desire to be involved in civic participation. In the educational system, Strauss’ American Trustees project is using film to inspire teens with compelling tales of civic entrepreneurship by ordinary people, while giving educators powerful online curriculum and training resources.

At the college level, Strauss’ New Politics Forum opens the door to young people inspired to pursue a career in politics by providing hands-on training and exposure to high-level political professionals, political journalists and university researchers.

Seminar topics include: Careers in Politics, Techniques in Campaign Management, Campaign “Boot camp” and Campaign Communications. In election years, UT Votes goes into high gear, registering hundreds of University of Texas students to vote, and getting them to the polls on election-day.

All these successful programs have one common goal – to turn our young Americans into better neighbors and citizens. Cutting-edge Research

On the research front, the Strauss team examines civic participation and voting issues to decipher the root causes of today’s growing political cynicism. Cutting-edge studies such as the 2007 Gates Report (examining the basic civics skills young Americans needed to learn in order to act as citizens) and the Working Youth Research Project (examining how social ties of non-college students influence political participation) help explain the forces influencing young Americans.

The studies also give educators and policy-makers the data needed to make effective policy and curriculum decisions.

The Strauss Institute also has two survey research arms, the Center for Deliberative Opinion Research and the Office of Survey Research, which provide expert survey and field research data for academic, non-profit, government, and business clients.

TIPI: Communications & Information Policy Institute

Dr. Sharon Strover seems to deal with our increasingly interconnected world in a highly efficient way.

Strover launched the Telecommunications & Information Policy Institute in 1996, using research and collaborative initiatives to help both individuals and governments become digital citizens — while working to help both domestic and international communities bridge the digital divide.

“As Internet-based applications and networked communications become ubiquitous, the ways we work, play and communicate are migrating to these networks,” Strover says, “Grappling with how people are using these technologies and media, and how institutions and governments can benefit from them are an important part of any country’s productivity equation.”

TIPI’s work is multifaceted, conducting and facilitating research on the role of telecommunication and new technology in modern societies. It serves as a resource of digital policy information for both public and private policy makers.

An example: a recent USDA-funded study on rural broadband access is helping to identify just who is being left behind and what that implies for American society. And as technologies migrate towards new capabilities, TIPI’s research questions will likewise move.

Strover points to South Korea, where broadband access is so taken for granted that they no longer think of it as an issue.

“The issue is ubiquity: accessing networks at any time, any place,” Strover says. “This is something that the U.S. clearly needs to target in the future even though right now we are still mired in simple issues of access.”

In the field, TIPI is advancing digital media education through collaborations such as the Austin/Portugal International Collaboratory for Emerging Technologies program, administered by the University of Texas and overseen by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation.

CoLab’s four programs — advanced computing, digital media, technology transfer and commercialization, and mathematics — are intended to promote education and research, as well as economic development and job creation in Portugal.

Strover says the collaboration will allow the College’s faculty, and their Portuguese colleagues, to construct academic programs that meaningfully engage digital media in terms that are theoretical, creative and practical. Both the new curriculum and the research projects underway operate on a number of levels, engaging working professionals, master’s and Ph.D. students, as well as faculty on both sides of the Atlantic.

This collaboration is diverse, including digital libraries, the digital divide, online journalism and convergent cinema. For Strover, a Stanford graduate who has spent most of her career studying new media and access issues, the CoLab project is not only a golden opportunity to broaden TIPI’s interests, it’s also an chance to take it in new, possibly unexpected directions.

To read more: about TIPI, about the CoLab program and read the CoLab blog

Texas Speech and Hearing Center

Our ability to speak, comprehend and use language is what sets humans apart from other animals — and the loss of that ability can be crippling.

Cracking the code of human communication processes, and solving the riddles of treating communication disorders, is the Holy Grail at the College of Communication’s Speech and Hearing Center. The primary mission of the UTSHC is to turn research findings into effective treatments while training the next generation of researchers and clinicians.

The team is led by Dr. Craig Champlin, who specializes in auditory perception and, as a young audiologist in the 1980s, participated in a newborn screening program that implemented a new idea — that a newborn’s hearing status could be assessed by measuring the brain’s response to sound.

Champlin recalls screening a lot of babies at his Missouri hospital and became curious about the test: Were a premature infant’s responses different? What sounds worked best? And why? What kind of errors occurred and how could they be minimized?

His search for answers not only led Champlin back to graduate school in pursuit of a doctoral degree, but made him a passionate advocate of “evidence based practice.”

Simply put, this method seeks to identify which treatments work best, and why, giving practitioners and families viable, proven treatment options. Under Champlin’s direction, the Center has become a leading advocate of evidence-based practice in the communication sciences and disorders field.

The Center’s Research Laboratories study a wide spectrum of disorders. Just a few of the research labs housed at the center include:

The Aphasia Lab Headed by Dr. Swathi Kiran, the lab is exploring treatment methods for aphasia, an acquired language problem caused by brain damage from either stroke or traumatic injury. Neuro-imaging and online experiments are used to analyze language processing and to map changes in the brain that result from speech therapy.

Auditory Perception Lab investigates the auditory perception of speech and non-speech signals with the goal of helping the hearing-impaired gain increased speech comprehension. Other research involves the signal processing techniques used in hearing aids. The lab also houses the UT Cochlear Implant program and is capable of mapping cochlear implants.

Developmental Stuttering Laboratory Dr. Courtney Byrd and her team are researching the nature of stuttering from onset through development. One major focus is the combined contribution of linguistic processing and motor planning to the onset of childhood stuttering. The lab also researches the development of evidence-based treatment for children and adult stutterers.

Speech Motor Control Lab researchers are investigating how the human nervous system programs and executes speech movements, and how nervous system damage affects a patient’s ability to speak.

The Speech and Hearing Center also provides patient services to hundreds of local patients each year, including assessments, screenings and ongoing therapy. Both the assessments and therapy are administered by graduate students under the supervision of certified and licensed speech pathologists and audiologists.

Web Links: Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Speech and Hearing Center: Research and: research labs with the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Aphasia Laboratory: