The Michael Hoefges Graduate Student Research Fund
Investing in student research on media law
In honor of the late Dr. Michael Hoefges, Associate Professor Emeritus from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, the Law & Policy Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) established a research fund to support graduate student research in media law.
2022-23
- Patrick Johnson, a doctoral student at the University of Iowa, will conduct an in-depth interview study with high school journalism teachers and media advisors to inform how we conceptualize media law literacy as a component of news literacy knowledge.
- Alexis Shore, a doctoral student at Boston University, will conduct a mixed-methods study that combines case analysis with an experiment to explore the impacts and harms of screenshot tools on personal privacy rights.
- Sheila Lalwani, a doctoral student at the University of Texas-Austin, will conduct a case analysis and content analysis on materials surrounding the first-ever gendered hate speech case in Germany since its passing of the Network Enforcement Act to map the regulatory actions civil society groups have taken to address cyber height against female German politicians.
2021-22 (inaugural)
- Rohan Grover, a doctoral student at the University of Southern California, for his in-depth interview study of technology workers and their attitudes and experiences in shaping and implementing privacy regulations in the wake of policies like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
- Moon Nguyen, a doctoral student at Hong Kong Baptist University, for her mixed-methods study of content analysis and in-depth interviews that examined how Vietnamese mainstream media portrayed, responded, and justified (amidst criticism from international media and organizations) the country’s new cyber-security regulations for state-controlled person data, and how journalists choose to align, improvise, or confront the new regulations.
- Jessica Sparks, a doctoral student at the University of Florida, for her survey study on the mediating effect of government trust on media trust and perceptions of credibility for news articles that cite public records.