Candis Callison, a doctoral candidate at MIT whose research focuses on the public communication of climate change, will be joining the Graduate School of Journalism as an Assistant Professor June 1, 2009.
Candis, who was a journalist at the CBC, CTV and APTN prior to attending graduate school, is currently completing her dissertation, tentatively titled “Spinning Climate Change for Americans: How diverse advocates are making science meaningful to Americans.”
Her research looks at how Americans learn about climate change by examining the experiences of three distinct social groups working outside of mainstream environmental movements. Her work seeks to understand how climate change has moved beyond traditional ideals of scientific authority to the realm of business, ethics, and morality.
She is also interested in the ways in which media as a result of new technologies and fragmentation provide a more robust field in which activists and individuals are productively relating environmental issues and scientific facts to everyday life and societal structures. She undertook her doctoral degree within the Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at MIT.
Candis has a master’s degree in Comparative Media Studies at MIT focusing on issues related to visual culture, media convergence, and digital representations of the environment. Her thesis, “A Digital Assemblage: Diagramming the Social Realities of the Stikine Watershed,” looked at the Stikine River area as a condition for relating factors of knowledge, discourse, and power. The Stikine is home to Tahltan and Tlingit Nations, sparsely populated, and under immense development pressure.
Candis’ professional background previous to graduate school includes seven years of producing, writing, researching and reporting for television, the Internet, and radio in Canada (CBC, CTV, APTN) and the United States (Lycos, Tech TV). For her early work in media convergence, Candis was profiled in the 2003 book, Technology with Curves: Women Reshaping the Digital Landscape. Her independently produced film Traditional Renaissance (1995) was included in the UBC Museum of Anthropology’s 2003-04 exhibition on Tahltan culture, Mehodihi: Our Great Ancestors Lived that Way.
From 2000-02, Candis was selected by the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation as the CN Aboriginal Scholar, and in 2004-05, she was a Martin Family Fellow for Sustainability. Born and raised in and around Vancouver, Candis is a member of the Tahltan Nation located in northwestern B.C. After a decade in the U.S., she is enjoying being back in Vancouver again with her husband and five-year old daughter.
Candis will be leading and team-teaching in a number of courses including Science Journalism, our New Media and Society course at the undergraduate level, Press and Society (which we will be revamping as Media & Society) and iJournalism.
