Home For Graduate Students The Cutting Edge: Interdisciplinary Possibilities Cynthia Stohl
Cynthia Stohl PDF  | Print |  E-mail
Professor, Communication

Dr. Stohl is concerned with the relationships among internal and external communication processes as they are manifest in global collaborations. Her most recent work addresses a diversity of network and collective action organizations in the global context including a focus on new communication technologies and terrorist organizations. She is now a co-principal investigator on an NSF grant on Technological Change and Collective Association: Changing Relationships Among Technology, Organizations, Society, and the Citizenry.

When I first arrived at UCSB, I was told about the supportive interdisciplinary culture but I didn’t really understand what it meant. During my first year, I attended several talks sponsored by many of the interdisciplinary centers on campus. Before long, and as a direct result of the informal, informative, and intellectually stimulating interactions that took place during these presentations I was involved in writing an NSF grant with colleagues from my own and other disciplines. The many opportunities to meet, interact, and network with others who have similar interests but are outside your home department truly embodies the interdisciplinary spirit that is UCSB.

I have always been interested in the societal benefits of organizational participation but not until I began working with colleagues who focus on political action and technology did I begin to fully account for the theoretical frameworks that have been developed in other disciplines that address the very phenomena I had been approaching from a communicative perspective. Working with colleagues in Communication and Political Science, we developed and conducted a survey of over 10,000 members of collective action organizations to explore the relationship between new communication technologies and ways of organizing. Based on the results of the survey, we are completing a book, The Transformation of Collective Life: Engaging and Organizing in the Contemporary Media Environment, which argues that collective life has been transformed by changing technology and thus there is a need to reconsider traditional theories of collective action and organizing that have been prominent in political science, economics, communication, and sociology.

Graduates students from Political Science, Communication and Media Arts have been directly involved in the research program. Besides working directly on this particular grant, many of our graduates students working on issues related to information technology and society have also taken advantage of the opportunities provided by the Center for Information, Technology, and Society and the Center for Nanotechnology in Society. Serving on the executive council of the CITS and teaching graduate courses on globalization and communication that are part of the interdisciplinary program, have introduced me to students across a diversity of departments in Engineering, the Social Sciences, Education, and the Humanities whose research addresses some of the most complex and significant problems facing the world today, which we recognize can only be addressed through the integration of theory, methods, and expertise across multiple disciplines.

The key to UCSB is taking advantage of the many types of opportunities that are available. Graduate students in the Communication Department are active participants in the programs, public events, lectures, and conferences sponsored by the interdisciplinary centers on campus. Graduate students take classes across the university that lead to special certificates in such areas as Language Interaction and Social Organization, Global Studies, and Technology and Society. Getting to know faculty across campus, working with these faculty on research projects, as well as working part time in the administration and support of these programs not only improves the quality of students’ own work but increases the breadth and depth of the types of positions students are eligible for upon completion of their Ph.D’s. Most importantly, through these opportunities students develop a rich and diverse network of support that goes far beyond their time as students at UCSB.