Dr. Christina Ceisel earned her Ph.D. from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a focus in cultural studies, transnational popular culture, and qualitative methods. She holds a M.A. in Social Science from the University of Chicago, and a B.S. in Media Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Smith is an Associate Teaching Professor at the University of Washington, Tacoma. Personal research interests include critical internet studies, hypercommericalized media texts and consumer culture, and the various mass media discourses surrounding environmentalist identities through both lifestyles and governmentality frameworks.

Russell is an Associate Professor at Emerson College. His work explores the intersections of the political economy of communication, neoliberalism, the epistemological foundations of media policymaking, commercial and governmental surveillance, and activism surrounding communications policy.

Rachel Guldin is a PhD candidate in Communication and Media Studies in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon.
She researches neoliberal capitalism and racism in media literacy education and takes a critical cultural approach to analyze popular culture.

Dr. Nolan Higdon is an author and university lecturer of history and media studies. Higdon’s areas of concentration include digital culture, news media history, and critical media literacy. Higdon is a founding member of the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas. He sits on the boards of the Action Coalition for Media Education (ACME) and Northwest Alliance For Alternative Media And Education. His most recent publication is The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Literacy Education (University of California Press, 2020). He is a longtime contributor to Project Censored’s annual book, Censored. In addition, he has been a contributor to Truthout and Counter-Punch; and a source of expertise for The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous television news outlets.es here

Aaron is an Associate Professor of Strategic Communication and Associate Dean of the School for Professional and Continuang Studies at California Lutheran University. His research focuses on media industries and financialization.

Alicia Kozma and Chair and Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Washington College. Dr. Kozma combines a practical focus on media labor with critical inquiry to understand how media industries work, who works in them, and how the labor of media workers is constructed. She focuses specifically on women and other minority workers in film and television workspaces.

Dr. Steve Macek is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication and Media Studies at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. He teaches courses on media history, media criticism, censorship and the First Amendment. He has been a member of UDC since 1999

T.C. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) where he coordinates the Master of Arts in Communication Studies. T.C.’s research examines the relationships between wealth, power, and the media, also known as the political economy of communication (PEC). He’s specifically interested in sports media, the 'hope labor' of interns and other digital laborers, critical realist philosophy, and that paradigm’s methodological implications for PEC. He also loves a good culture jam

Dr. Andrew Kennis is an invited scholar affiliated with the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City, where he serves as a coordinating member of a research collective based at the College of Political and Social Sciences (FCPyS). Dr. Kennis is a nationally inducted researcher in a program (SNI) run under the auspices of Mexico’s National Council on Science and Technology (CONACyT) and recently published a book prefaced by Daniel and Noam Chomsky and Robert W. McChesney entitled, Digital-Age Resistance: Journalism, Social Movements and the Media Dependence Model. As a pedagogue, he currently teaches graduate-level classes at Rutgers University after having also taught at UNAM, Northwestern University, the University of Texas at El Paso and many other universities from both sides of the border while also continuing to practice as an international and investigative journalist, having reported from locations ranging across four continents and dozens of countries.es here

Dr. Yousman’s research focuses on media and the construction of ideology, the role media representations play in shaping perceptions of race, and the relationship between media and democracy. His scholarship includes critical analyses of media images of the prison industrial complex, ideology in the films of Spike Lee, the social impact of rap music and hip-hop culture.

Helena is an Associate Professor of Media Arts, Department of Arts and Humanities, School of Informatics, Humanities and Social Sciences, Robert Morris University. He research interests include: critical political economy of communication; cultural studies; media industries; film, television, streaming, and video; theory, history and production; terrorism and media; film and international politics