Robin Blom

My first edited volume (Teaching Race: Struggles, Strategies, and Scholarship for the Mass Communication Classroom) was released in September 2021 as the fourth publication in the AEJMC Master Class series. George Daniels (University of Alabama) is the co-editor of the volume. Our royalties will go the AEJMC Minorities and Communications Division. (You can find order information here: link)

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I am the director of the Unified Research Lab, where I facilitate eye-tracking, virtual reality, psycho-physiology, and gaming studies with more than a dozen faculty and student researchers. My own research is primarily focused on expectancy violations as a mechanism of understanding misinformation and media bias perceptions. The main goal of those research projects is to develop media literacy strategies to teach people successful ways to recognize, reject, and retract misinformation. I also study the role of news media outlets in wrongful conviction cases for publishing eyewitness misidentification accounts and the structural violence that this has caused toward the innocent and their vulnerable communities.

I am currently an editorial board member of Communication Research, Newspaper Research Journal, and Journalism & Mass Communication Educator. I am also the book review editor of the Educator since 2023 and I have also served as an editorial assistant for that journal in 2006-2007. I also was an editorial assistant for Communication Yearbook (Vol. 35).

My work has been published in a variety of academic journals, such as Journalism; Journalism Studies; Journalism Practice; Newspaper Research Journal; American Behavioral Scientist; Journal of Media Sociology; Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking; and Journalism and Mass Communication Educator. I also have published seven book chapters in edited volumes with two other chapters in press.

Early stages of works-in-progress have been presented at conferences and colleges in eleven countries. This includes lectures at the Yangon School of Political Science (Myanmar) and Shanghai International Studies University. I also have presented at conferences in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Italy, New Zealand, Peru, Switzerland, and the United States.

At the start of the 2019-2020 academic year, I was awarded the Distinguished Research Award by the College of Communication, Information, and Media (CCIM), after earning the High Technology Award from the college three years earlier for creating a media analytics hub in our campus newsroom. Additionally, I was presented the Martha Rayne Award for Media History Research by the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame in 2011.