Media Research & Action Project

MArcus BReen

Marcus Breen was born in Melbourne and educated at The University of Queensland, The Australian National University and Victoria University in Melbourne. Since Fall 2014 he has been a full-time faculty member in the Communication Department at Boston College, where he is also the Director of the Media Lab.

In the 1980s he worked as a magazine, community radio and suburban newspaper journalist before becoming a specialist reporter on the Australian music and film industries. He worked for The Hollywood Reporter and Music Business International, providing coverage about the industry in Australasia.

In the 1990s he moved into research and consulting in the converged media space. He was director of the cultural industries program at the Centre for International Research on Communication and Information Technologies (CIRCIT) in Melbourne before working as a consultant on the formation of Multimedia Victoria in the Victorian Department of State Development. Later he worked for Gartner, consulting in the US, Mexico and the Caribbean on telecommunication policy, new media and regulation. 

He has taught in Communication, Media and Cultural Studies programs at The University of Melbourne, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Northeastern University and Bond University, Australia, where his responsibilities included time as Associate Dean in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Head of School for Media and Communication.

His books include Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences (2011), Common Ground Publishing and Rock Dogs: Politics and the Australian Music Industry (1999), Pluto Press. He edited Missing in Action: Australian Popular Music in Perspective (Vol. 1, 1987) Verbal Graphics, and Our Place Our Music: Aboriginal Music. Australian Popular Music in Perspective (Vol. 2, 1989) Aboriginal Studies Press. His work has been published in a range of journals and as book chapters. He is editor of the International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society.      

He occasionally records Boston Media Theory, a collection of interviews with Boston activists, academics and researchers who live and work in the city and whose work contributes to social movement theory and practice. The interviews, recorded at Newton Community Television, are available on You Tube. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9OkPztazE5WDuF4PQ-lYdA

He occasionally blogs at Uprising, http://breencomments.blogspot.com/  

Kevin M. Carragee

Kevin M. Carragee teaches in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Suffolk University. He joined MRAP in 1990.

He has a deep interest in the relationship between the news media and democracy, with ongoing research on the interaction between the news media and social movements. Carragee also examines the relationship between news and ideology.

He received a Fulbright Scholarship in 1993 for teaching and research in Poland, and has produced studies examining American news media coverage of both the Solidarity trade union movement and the end of the Cold War. Carragee also has a longstanding interest in urban communication, especially struggles related to contested urban space.   

His recent work, produced in collaboration with Larry Frey (University of Colorado at Boulder) and strongly influenced by MRAP, has defined a particular form of engaged communication scholarship: communication activism research (CAR). CAR, as a form of activist scholarship, focuses on communication researchers working with and for disenfranchised groups to secure social and political change. Frey and Carragee have produced three edited volumes related to CAR: Communication Activism: Communication for Social Change (2007); Communication Activism: Media and Performance Activism (2007); Communication Activism: Struggling for Social Justice Amidst Difference (2012).

Carragee and Frey currently are working on a book providing researchers with an examination of the challenges and opportunities confronting CAR. 

William A. Gamson

Sociologist William Gamson founded MRAP and served as its Co-Director till his retirement from Boston College. He wrote Talking Politics (1992) and The Strategy of Social Protest (2nd edition, 1990) among other books and articles on political discourse, the mass media and social movements. He served as president of the American Sociological Association in 1994.

Always interested in games, Bill (with Matt Williams and others) created the Global Justice Game, a tool for training activists and for teaching undergraduate courses on globalization issues. The full game consists of seven cases, each based on a different scenario; while fictional, the cases were grounded in rigorous research and incidents ripped from headlines.

Charlotte Ryan

Prior to becoming a sociologist, Charlotte Ryan worked as an organizer in labor, community, health and anti-intervention movements. She teaches environmental sociology, participatory communication, as well as collaborative and field-based research methods at UMASS-Lowell.

Ryan authored Prime Time Activism (South End Press) and, with MRAP veterans, David Croteau and William Hoynes, she co-edited Rhyming Hope and History: Activists, Academics and Social Movement Scholarship (UMINN 2005).

With community organizer Karen Jeffreys, Ryan recently published Beyond Prime Time Activism: Communication Activism and Social Change (Routledge).

She collaborates with regional and national social movement organizations working to integrate movement and communication strategies. Her current popular writing project is An Activist’s Guide to Frame Analysis. Her current research involves documenting and analyzing the development of a ten-year scholar-activist partnership.