Professor of Communication Studies Bob Bednar presented a plenary talk titled “Bringing the Archives Out of the Archives: Mobilizing and Reframing University Archives in Critiques of Campus Commemorative Landscapes” at the Austin Archives Bazaar, held at Scholz Garten in Austin on April 14. The talk described the experience of developing the Placing Memory Interactive Story Map in Summer 2023 with Megan Firestone, Head of Distinctive Collections and Archives, and a team of 11 student researchers: Bettina Castillo ’24, Max Colley ’24, Adrianna Flores-Vivas ’24, Lainey Gutierrez ’25, Teddy Hoffman ’24, Hannah Jury ’24, Shawn Maganda ’24, Harper Randolph ’25, Andrea Stanescu ’24, Michelle Taing ’24, and Ava Zumpano ’25.

Professor of Communication Studies Bob Bednar has published an article titled “Roadside Media: Roadside Crash Shrines as Platforms for Communicating Across Time, Space, and Mortality in the Early 2000s United States” in Cultural and Social History, The Journal of the Social History Society. The article traces the recent history of roadside shrines to show that they are not only entangled with other contemporary media forms but have also developed into miniaturized and materialized social media platforms. The article officially comes out in print later this winter and is now available here.

Teddy Hoffman ’24 presented a paper at the Communicating Diversity Conference at Texas A&M University on May 6, 2023. Her paper, “Resisting Geographies of Fear and Enacting a Safer World: Solo Female Travel Influencers and their Rhetorical Constructions,” was supervised by Professor of Communication Studies Bob Bednar. The paper received one of only two Top Undergraduate Paper prizes awarded at the conference.

Professor of Communication Studies Bob Bednar published an article titled “Trauma Remains: The Material Afterlives of the 1989 Alton School Bus Crash,” in the October 2022 issue of the Journal of Material Culture. The article analyzes the ways a large roadside shrine in South Texas where 21 middle and high school students were killed in a crash in 1989 continues to quietly but forcefully reverberate as a site of collective trauma more than thirty years later.

Professor of Communication Studies Bob Bednar was one of the central people interviewed for The Taking, a feature-length documentary film by Alexandre O. Phillipe about Monument Valley.  The film explores how Monument Valley, located on the border of Arizona and Utah but also within the Navajo Nation, has repeatedly been made into a symbol of the white settler myth of the American West by filmmakers and other media producers while denying Navajo sovereignty and subjectivity. The Taking has appeared at multiple film festivals in the last several months, including the BFI London Film Festival, Fantastic Fest in Austin, and the New Zealand International Film Festival.