Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship Podcast Series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today our architect is Dr. Travis Dixon. Dr. Dixon is a media effects scholar who specializes in the investigation of stereotypes and mass media. Dr. Dixon is a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professorial Scholar as well as a professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Communication Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Dr. Dixon is also the first African American scholar to be inducted as a fellow of the International Communication Association. Today, Dr. Dixon is in conversation with Dr. Marisa Smith. Dr. Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Advertising & Public Relations and the School of Journalism at Michigan State University. Here's Dr. Smith.
I can honestly say that Travis Dixon is a true pioneer in the field of communication. He has translated what he saw in everyday news, the representation of African Americans, and collected research to make empirical and theoretical contributions, not only to help us understand race and media but also to understand overall media effects. So, welcome Travis Dixon. It's great to have you as our guest this morning, and I am excited to discuss your scholarship.
Thank you for having me.
First, I want to talk a little bit about your personal history. Can you tell us about your personal background, but also your scholarship background?
I grew up in what people have called South Central Los Angeles, or some people just call South Central. Growing up there, there were a lot of different realities that existed. Some of them you've seen in the movies or people talked about, but the thing that was really amazing about my upbringing, is that there are all kinds of people who lived in my community. My parents really insisted that I take school seriously. They encouraged me to attend a high school called Washington Preparatory High School, and at the time that was run by a person named George McKenna. And George McKenna was one of the educational reformists of his era, who focused on getting Black, Latino students to attend college. By the time I graduated upwards of 80% of us, or more, we're going to four-year and two-year colleges. It was such a great story that they made a made-for-TV movie about my high school called "The George McKenna Story" and Denzel Washington played my principal. I went on from there to UCLA. Very early on, became interested in communication, and got my Bachelor's there, and was influenced by a few people who were there at the time, including Shanto Iyengar and a few others. Then moved on to graduate school at the University of California Santa Barbara, got my MA and PhD from UCSB, and studied with Dan Linz and a few others.
During your time at UCLA, you became interested in the field of communication. Can you tell me a little bit more of how you came into this field of study?
I was attending orientation for new students. You went to orientation in order to get what was called preferential enrollment, so that you'd be one of the early people trying to select classes and therefore had a better shot at getting our classes. As I was attending orientation, I actually experienced quite a bit of racism from my roommates, college counselor, and from other people. Now we call those microaggressions, but just a slew of microaggressions. And so I actually had a pretty not great time at orientation. But the best part of orientation was that during the time I was there, there was a presentation on the Communication Studies major, and I learned that Communication Studies was interdisciplinary, interdepartmental, it allowed us to answer all these really amazing questions. If you want to be a Comm. major, you have to apply, you can't just say I'm going to be a Comm. major and sign up for the classes and matriculate through the system. Instead, you have to apply, the faculty review your application, and then they decide who to admit to the major and who not to. And to be honest with you, most people who were in the major at that time were not Black. In fact, when I applied I remember there was one Black woman who was in the major. We used to make a joke like there was this alleged other Black male that no one ever saw. So at that time, the professors began to really think hard about that lack of diversity and thought about those of us who really were struggling to do well, because one of the main things that you had to do to get in was get really high grades in the weeder GenEd classes of all the other social sciences. That was hard and it's UCLA. At that time, I was able to kind of matriculate eventually into the major. But I was originally interested and drawn to it because of that presentation, I thought this is what I wanted to do.
So you mentioned a few people that had an impact on you. Who are your mentors while you have been in the field of communication?
Obviously Shanto Iyengar was really instrumental. I have to really give him credit because he tapped me as an undergraduate to work as an RA. And I know he didn't do that all the time. I actually ended up working on that initial project with someone who became a colleague later, he was in grad school at the time. It was Nicholas Valentino, we end up working together later at the University of Michigan. There were other people there, Marde Gregory, Geoff Cowan, Jeff Cole. They were just some phenomenal professors I had as an undergraduate. When I got to grad school, I had some really interesting experiences visiting schools, and they were not all positive. And what was really telling is when I got to UC Santa Barbara, I met Dan Linz. Dan Linz was the Director of Graduate Studies at the time. One of the things he told me is "We will support your research. We really don't do what you're interested in. We don't really do race, stereotyping and all these things you're interested in studying. But we can make you a really good scholar, if you come to UCSB. We will help you be really meticulous, rigorous, and help you to be able to produce really phenomenal research." They gave me financial support, admitted me and seemed to be behind me. Ed Donnerstein was my mentor there and he was really phenomenal. One of the violence scholars of an era to be honest with you. I also worked pretty closely with Barbara Wilson, who eventually recruited me to the University of Illinois. She said, "Travis I want you at Illinois." And invited me to apply to a position here. And that's how I ended up at the University of Illinois many years later. First of all, the faculty, even though they were great, they were predominantly white male faculty, two women. And so Barb was very instrumental in showing me how to deal with being a little bit different and pushing forward. And she was one of the only people who even taught about media stereotyping in her classes. I would also add Dale Kunkel, as well, who really encouraged me to think about media policy and how policy intersects with a lot of the different phenomenon we're interested in as media effects scholars. So, those are my biggest mentors in grad school. As I began thinking about my dissertation, I had this conversation with Dan and we had a really honest conversation about direction. I came in knowing I want to do race, media and stereotyping this is what I want to do. And Dan was like, "Yeah, all right, I can help you with that. But can we do news? Can we do something that intersects with my law and policy interests?" That was the compromise. No entertainment media, do news. As I was looking around, I came across the scholarship of two people who are just phenomenal. Mary Beth Oliver, being the first one, wrote a piece in the 90's dealing with police crime stories, crime shows like "Cops". And it really influenced how I thought about research and rigor, and how to approach even content analysis studies, as well as media effects studies. The other person was Robert Entman who at the time was at Northwestern and had done a series of studies, I should say, dealing with Chicago news. There's one more person I want to mention on this question. Once I got to Michigan, I had the good fortune of working with a number of really brilliant people, and one of them was named Richard Allen. Richard Allen was one of the earliest phenomenal media effects scholars that did race research. He was doing very sophisticated modeling in his survey designs in the 70's. It was much less common back then than it is now. So those are the people I want to highlight today.
Can you give me a little bit more about who have served as your intellectual models?
I would say three people have obviously served in that role. Dan Linz, Mary Beth Oliver, and essentially, most of the folks who did cultivation research, so George Gerbner and his crew, Nancy Signorielli. What I've been trying to do is understand the extent to which media representations lead to various outcomes in terms of effects and I've taken a social cognitive approach, as well. There are other psychologists I should say that also had an intellectual influence on me like David Hamilton when I was at UC Santa Barbara, Diane Mackie, a few others. So intellectually, I'm being influenced by social psychologists in terms of trying to understand the process and the extent to which there are these various associations between specific social categories and various traits. One of the things that has often been done by people in the Cultural Indicators Project is say, "Here's a particular phenomenon, we see that women tend to show up as victims of crime more than they do as perpetrators of crime." You can actually calculate a ratio that helps you understand the extent to which they're more likely to show up as victims and as perpetrators. We ask some additional questions and we use Mary Beth's thinking to keep going on this, which is to say, "How do we know whether or not that portrayal is consistent or inconsistent with reality?" So intellectually, we've tried to really push on that and push scholars to say, "No, we can't just say we see this pattern, and we're done. We have to now test it." And we talked a lot about inner-reality comparisons where we test the representation against something outside of the media to really see whether or not that's some sort of biased view that can therefore influence our thinking. The other thing is the pattern of really consistently trying to lay out what the content is telling us and then from there, look at specific data patterns that should be tested in effect studies later.
As you reflect back in time, when do you think that communication has had an impact on society, given your background, your experience, your mentors and all of the work that you've done in the field of communication?
When I was really early on having this conversation about my interest in media and race, they did have this question, "What is your study with media and race? Why do we care about that?" When I was coming out of undergrad and heading into grad school, The Cosby Show was the thing. It was really important and very popular. And people had this view that racism, overt racism, is a thing of the past and it doesn't really need to be investigated or studied. That was a very big narrative with regards to how we thought about racism and media at that time. And so people thought there was nothing to do with regards to this area. I don't think that's the question anymore. As communication scholars, we've been able to explain, for instance, how you can have a Trump presidency and be successful from the standpoint of him winning the presidency and people to this day still wanting him to be president. It's explainable through things that we studied with regards to media effects and stereotyping. We can explain vaccine hesitancy and disinformation. That's something that we can do. That's something we can contribute to. We can help society understand, "Why are people vaccine hesitant?" And, "Why is there this association with racism around the issue of hesitancy?" Those are things that we can do today. Those are contributions communications has made to our dialogue about some of the biggest things happening - the pandemic, our politics, which are fractured and hyperpartisan. We help give light to why that's occurring, and sometimes strategies for how we move forward with regards to making that better.
That's an excellent point. A lot of times when people are trying to figure out what's going on in society, especially when we look at things that overlap between behavior and politics, some people may overlook contributions that communication has that can help answer those questions. What do you think are the big intellectual questions for our communication scholars that we should address in the next decade?
I think that we have done a really good job of explaining what happens and why it happens with regards to media effects and stereotyping. We have a better understanding of process, we have a better understanding of the representations, we have a better understanding of the patterns and how those patterns lead to specific outcomes. And I think we've done a great job of that. What we have not done a good job of, and that still bothers me, is that research should be driven by emotion. As much as we want to be rigorous, theoretically grounded, methodologically sound, what wakes you up in the morning? What makes you upset? How can we make it better? That's what we want to be thinking about. And what makes me concerned and something I want to focus on in myself and I want everyone to turn our attention to is intervention work. How do we remedy these things? We've seen these patterns, documented how this occurs. What do we do about it? How do we actually reverse it? What do we do to make this do counter-stereotypical work? How do we debias people? How do we decrease the influence of disinformation in specific communities that you're interested in, in your work? How do we do that? The next 10 years is going to be crucial for us to remain relevant. Because if we sit up and say, "Yeah, basically, the media is racist, and it causes society to be more racist," which we've established, then that's okay. So, what do we do about it? And that's really a question for all of us as scholars. How do we fix it? How do we make it better? How do we disrupt those patterns? I'm not saying that we've done nothing. That's not true. There are people who are doing things and some of it's great, but I don't think it's as well developed as that other part. That's what we need to focus on the next 10 years.
Follow-up question with respect to fixing things and making contributions, in your area of research, what do you think are the big societal challenges and opportunities where communication scholarship can make a major contribution?
I think that we can continue to make contributions when it comes to healthcare delivery and disparities. The other thing is the issue of technology and technological changes. I think we can continue to make inroads with regards to how has technology changed things and made some things more difficult, some things more easy. Looking at that, I think we can continue to make contributions to thinking about race and media, trying to understand different kinds of audiences and how they approach technology. There are definitely three ways in which this might occur. One of them is that media or new media can be used to simply reinforce stereotypes in a very similar way to traditional media. The other thing, though, is that it can obviously be worse. Hyperpartisanship, the disparities, the disinformation can be enhanced based upon the way in which social media use operates. And then on the other hand, there is a possibility that people can use social media, new media, to disrupt these processes and to push back on those. In the Trayvon Martin situation, I remember in real time the traditional news media was not talking about Trayvon Martin. What happened was, people were talking about it online. Intermediate agenda setting took place where people online began to say, "This is important, this is problematic, and how can George Zimmerman not be charged? He should be charged." So, the actual first push was, can you charge George Zimmerman? Because they were not going to charge him because of the Stand-Your-Ground law. It was literally what became the Black Lives Matter activists and other people who were concerned online, who drove the media narrative, the traditional media narrative, and then that led prosecutors to eventually charge George Zimmerman. He was obviously acquitted, but he would not have been charged if not for that activism. But there was a pushback on a narrative and new technologies allow us to do that. The socially mediated stereotyping model that I've been talking about for a couple of years allows us to begin to think about that for the future.
Since this podcast series is titled Architects of Communication Scholarship, what have you built in this field of communication?
I am one of the foundation makers. So, I helped build a foundation for you and all the next generation of scholars who came after me. When I entered the field, there was a lot of skepticism about what we were studying and whether or not it was useful, central, important. It was really common. I got specific pushback from faculty members who were like, "You're studying something boring" or "not appropriate". When we were first starting, if you went to ICA, NCA, it was common not to see any panels or papers presented that to do anything with media stereotyping. It was just common that they were just non-existent. Or there was a panel, one panel, last day of the conference, really early, and there will be like five people in the audience like, "Oh, wow, this is a really good panel. I wish more people were here." I heard that so many times. When I was in the field at that time, what I was really trying to commit myself to was, theoretically sound, methodologically rigorous work on media stereotyping, so that no one could say what we were doing was not important, that it didn't contribute, that it wasn't advancing anything. That was my goal to build that kind of foundation, so that you and others would never experience that. No one's ever gonna look at you and say, "Oh, you want to study disinformation and race? Oh, that's not anything to study." You all can come back behind me and do even better research, more methodologically sound, than when we did. And it builds upon it until we have a structure that really helps us to understand this really important phenomena. Media and stereotyping is no longer, in my view, the stepchild that it once was in the field, it's become much more central and I think a lot more people are aware of how important it is, after things like the election of Donald Trump, after vaccine hesitancy. I think people are now beginning to say, "Okay, yeah, this is not unimportant stuff, we should maybe pay more attention to it." So, I would say foundation building is my main contribution and hopefully I've done a good job.
I know there are other people in the field who can also applaud you for the job you have done in setting the foundation as an architect in the field of communication. I look forward to seeing the future work that you produce in the field of communication. So, thank you.
Thank you for having me.
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. This series is sponsored by Hong Kong Baptist University. Our producer is Sharlene Burgos. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about this episode, host, and architect, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description.
