Category Archives: Research

        
 
 
 
 

Knight center researchers awarded fellowships for research of water and energy

Ran Duan

Ran Duan


Two doctoral students affiliated with the Knight Center have been awarded research fellowships by the Environmental Science and Policy Program at Michigan State University.
The fellowships, each worth $7,000, will allow Ran Duan and Tsyoshi Oshita to conduct research in the areas of climate, food, energy, and water during the summer of 2016.
Duan will examine how news images of climate change affect people’s perceptions of the issue. The study takes a novel perspective by examining how abstractness of climate change presented in news images could potentially make people perceive the issue as distant and abstract.
Her study proposes three independent experiments, each focusing on a specific climate change theme – nature, industry and human themes. The results could have important implications for policymakers and communicators in terms of developing strategies for promoting climate change-related behaviors.
Tsyoshi Oshita

Tsyoshi Oshita


Oshita’s research focuses on public communication of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is considered as a solution to address climate change, however, nuclear accidents could entail serious and long-lasting damage to the surrounding environment, including water and farm fields.
 
Public understanding about benefits and risks of the energy use is crucial to deciding the future of the nuclear energy.  Oshita’s study will help understand how these benefits and risks have been informed by nuclear companies and how they should be presented to the public.
As part of the fellowship, the students will assist in the organization of a future ESPP colloquium on these issues and where they will present their work.

Innovative workshop communication challenge


By David Poulson
This video represents an intriguing challenge: How do you engage people with an unusual workshop that they didn’t attend?
It’s one of the communication projects that grew out of the Knight Center’s work with Michigan State University’s Global Center for Food Systems Innovation (GCFSI). The challenge of that work is to translate research into methods of better feeding the world in ways that engages the public.
In January GCFSI brought together food researchers from throughout the world to discuss not only their innovative ideas, but innovative mechanisms for fostering and then implementing such ideas.
This video distills and captures that effort.

Knight Center student lands research fellowship in Maine

Kevin Duffy

Kevin “Fitz” Duffy


Knight Center student Kevin Duffy recently accepted a research assistantship at the University of Maine in Orono.
Duffy, a second year master’s student at Michigan State University’s School of Journalism, currently reports for the center’s Great Lakes Echo. He was a co-recipient of the Knight Center’s Don Caldwell Memorial Scholarship in Environmental Journalism in 2015.
In August, he will join an interdisciplinary research team to investigate the perceptions of aquaculture — the fresh or salt water farming of fish, shellfish or aquatic plants — and to identify the best practices for communicating aquaculture’s role in coastal economies and food systems.
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Knight Center researchers publish study on media and environmental citizenship

Knight Center Research Director Bruno Takahashi and doctoral students Ran Duan and Tony Van Witsen, recently published the study “Revisiting environmental citizenship: The role of information capital and media use” in the journal Environment & Behavior.
The study examines the contextual and individual factors that influence environmental citizenship across nations. The results show that  at the individual level,  media use,  environmental concern,  and postmaterialism positively predict environmental citizenship.
At the country level, the study found  a stronger media effect in countries with less developed media systems, a finding opposite to the original assumption made by the researchers. The researchers surmise that this could be because less developed media systems are more centralized.
That could lead to more powerful agenda setting, including environmental agendas. It is also possible that more developed media systems promote consumerism more widely, as opposed to environmental messages.
The study was co-authored by Edson Tandoc Jr., assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.