Sharon Jarvis to be Featured at 29th Annual Fisher Lecture

The Department of Communication's 29th annual B. Aubrey Fisher Memorial Lecture will feature a talk by Dr. Sharon Jarvis, associate professor of communication studies at the University of Texas at Austin. 

The talk, titled “What does voting mean?”, will be presented Thursday, Oct. 22, 2015, at 7:30 p.m. in the Languages and Communication Building (LNCO), Room 1110. The event is free and open to the public. In Jarvis’s address, titled What Does Voting Mean?, she will present original research on how voters have been portrayed in news coverage of presidential elections, how citizens respond to these portrayals, and why journalists treat voters as they do. Her key findings show how coverage is more likely to depict voters as pawns of elites than as engaged actors, how the pawn frame increases cynicism about politics and frustration with the media, and how journalists are surprised to have sidelined voters so steadily.

On Friday, Oct. 23, at 10 a.m. in LNCO 2120, Jarvis will conduct an informal seminar, titled “What Counts” When Examining Texts:  Computerized Content Analytic, Qualitative, and Rhetorical Approaches, which is also free and open to the public.

Jarvis teaches and conducts research on political communication, language use and persuasion. She is the author of The Talk of the Party: Political Labels, Symbolic Capital & American Life (Rowman & Littlefield) and a co-author of Political Keywords: Using Language that Uses Us (Oxford University Press). Her articles, chapters, and reviews have appeared in Journal of Communication, Political Communication, Political Psychology, American Behavioral Scientist, Communication Quarterly, Communication Studies, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, among other outlets.

The B. Aubrey Fisher Memorial Lecture was established by the Department of Communication in 1986 to recognize the late Fisher’s outstanding achievements as a communication scholar and to provide a forum for presenting original research and theory in communication. The Department of Communication is proud to celebrate 29 years of continued scholarly excellence celebrated by the B. Aubrey Fisher Memorial Lecture.