Communication studies professor to discuss ‘Unnecessary Roughness’

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

A week before the Super Bowl, Dan Grano, associate professor of communication studies, will participate in the BagNewsSalon webinar on sports and media images at 1 p.m., Sunday, Jan. 27.

Grano will be one of the panelists talking about "Unnecessary Roughness: Football as a Reflection of American Culture in News Photos and Media Images.” The discussion will focus on a broad range of themes, including power and violence, commercialism, patriotism, militarism and gender roles. The panel discussion is taking place one week before the Feb. 3 Super Bowl.

BagNewsSalon will be broadcast live, via Google HangOut, on the BagNews website, accessed through this blog post http://bit.ly/BagSalonFootball at the scheduled time. Viewers will be encouraged to participate via Twitter. @BagNewsNotes Hashtag: #BagSalon

Grano is a faculty member in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, which is currently finalizing plans for a series of events centered on sports, education and the New South. Details will be announced on the college website.

Grano’s research focuses on how power shapes moral judgment, especially in cultural contexts like mediated sport. He has published in various journals within the communication studies discipline, including the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Rhetoric Society Quarterly and the Southern Communication Journal.

In addition to Grano, other BagNews Salon panelists are Marie Hardin, professor and associate dean in the College of Communications at Penn State University, who also is associate director of the Curley Center for Sports Journalism; Ken Jarecke, photojournalist and author of Husker Game Day 2010; Tom Oates, assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Department of American Studies at the University of Iowa; and Scott Strazzante, Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist for the Chicago Tribune.

Michael Butterworth, associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Bowling Green State University, will moderate the panel, hosted by Michael Shaw, the publisher of BagNewsNotes.

BagNewsNotes provides a way for photojournalists, academics and other informed observers to seek understanding on how visual media frames cultural and political events. BagNews seeks to better inform the levels of meaning, underlying story lines and agendas reflected in each day’s prominent news images. It does so “through an ongoing conversation between citizens, professionals from the photojournalism world, visual scholars and leading instructors and students from liberal arts, communications and photojournalism and journalism.”