Recent Work:
Governance Reform
Program Evaluation
Media Development
Int’l Rights and Culture
General Research Areas:
National Development
Social Change
Political Participation
Communication Rights
Recent Book Project: Sina Odugbemi and Thomas Jacobson (Eds.) (2008), Governance Reform Under Real World Conditions: Citizens, Stakeholders, and Voice. Washington DC: The World Bank. (Publication of the Communication for Governance and Accountability Program.)
Ongoing Research: 1) Predicting Democratic Legitimation from Citizen Assessments of Action Conditions in the Public Sphere. 2) Predicting Beneficiary Buy-In to Program Interventions from Beneficiary Action Condition Assessments. 3) Mapping the Public Sphere using network analysis techniques, 4) Rights and Cultural Change in China.
Currently undertaking a study of media development in Angola, Sierra Leone, and Angola in association with the BBC World Service Trust project “A National Conversation: Promoting Accountability, Transparency and Participation through partnerships with Public Broadcasters in Africa.”
Also working on a study of Tong Shijung’s book: ”The Discourse of Modernization: Habermas and the Chinese Discourse of Modernization” (Wild Peony Press), as a means of analyzing the question of universals in the work of Jurgen Habermas, with Lingling Pan and Li Meng.
My academic appointment is in the Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications and Mass Media. The body of my theoretical work concerns communication for development and social change including macro sociological theories of modernization as well as middle level studies of communication, government reform, civil society, etc. Applied research focuses on program evaluation and measuring public discourse conditions.
