Dr. Debra SpitulnikBio Statement
My central passion is to understand, document, and challenge people’s relationships with media and language. In my work, I investigate how media have the power to define reality and to set the tone for public culture and political life. I also examine the ways that people resist or reshape media messages. I work as a teacher-scholar-activist. I ask about the power relations and habits of talk that sustain or inhibit the production of knowledge. And I also work towards bringing scholarship out of the academy: to create awareness about how powerful media work ... and how new media futures might be built.
I am originally from Rochester, New York. Rochester is a medium sized city on Lake Ontario, near Buffalo, NY and Niagara Falls. Rochester is the home of Eastman Kodak, and is affectionately known as part of the Northeastern rust-belt or snow-belt. The Spitulnik extended family has over 100 members. Our name comes from a word related to the word “hospitality.” Besides Rochester, I’ve lived in Berkeley, San Diego, Chicago, Atlanta, Zambia, Kenya, and Italy. My educational and professional background is detailed below. On the personal side, I am an avid yoga practitioner and have strong ties to Italy through my husband and daughter. My interests in communication, language, and culture weave through a range of experiences and pursuits -- from peer counseling days in high school to pubic television and newspaper jobs in the San Francisco Bay area during college, from doctoral research on radio in Africa to current work on media and young adults in the US.
Current academic position: Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Emory University. I joined Emory in 1993. From 2002-2005, I served as the Director of Emory’s Program in Linguistics. I was a founding member of the Program in Linguistics and have served on its core faculty since 1995. I am also an associated faculty member in the Institute of African Studies and the Department of Women’s Studies.
Current interests: media theory, media ethnography, media literacy, discourse circulation, the relationship between media & national publics, and the ways that discourse creates realities. Earlier work has focused on: talk radio, multilingualism, codeswitching, lexical semantics, comparative linguistics, and the Bemba language of Zambia. Research grants have been awarded from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Wenner-Gren, Rockefeller Foundation, Spencer Foundation, National Science Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, Social Science Research Council, Emory’s Halle Institute for Global Learning, Emory’s Institute for Comparative and International Studies, and the University Research Committee at Emory.