The Turnage Fund has granted awards to faculty members for the first time to facilitate the study of political communication and media literacy in the 21st century. The faculty recipients include Douglas Kass, communications instructor; Byung Lee, associate professor of communications; and Safia Swimelar, assistant professor of political science.

Laura Roselle, professor in the department of political science and public administration, announced the 2012 recipients of Turnage Fund grant monies for scholarly research on political communication March 7.

The Turnage Family Faculty Innovation and Creativity Fund for the Study of Political Communication was established at Elon University in 2010. Last year, contributions by Dave Turnage were used to fund the conference Media and Politics: Openness, Accuracy, and Honesty in the 21st Century Media Landscape.

According to Roselle, the selection committee received many qualified applicants. Of those, four research projects were selected for the award.

[box]Turnage Fund 2012 recipients Douglas Kass, communications instructor Byung Lee, associate professor of communications Safia Swimelar, assistant professor of political science A group of Elon faculty, students and community organization[/box]

Kass is looking at the ways new and old forms of media are breaking down barriers in countries with limited policies on freedom of speech and press.

He plans to focus on Southeast Asia, Myanmar and Cambodia, as well as Central America, Cuba and Nicaragua.

“There is a lot of excitement right now about the effectiveness of new tools like smart phones and social media to affect change,” he said. “But whether there’s real change in many of these countries is still an unknown.”

The increasing importance of social media and political change caught the attention of another Elon faculty member.

Lee is studying the Twitter feeds of the five frontrunners in the 2012 presidential election. In addition to the messages sent by politicians, he is interested in the response from Twitter followers.

According to Lee, his research is about more than making discoveries in the realm of social media. He said he wanted to begin another study to connect with his students, showing them that the research process is scary for professors as well.

“In college, we are teaching not only some existing skills that (students) have to master, but also we have to teach them to overcome anxiety and embrace nervousness when they’re dealing with new things,” Lee said. “They have to have the mindset to learn new things without fear so they can venture into the unknown.”

For Swimelar, inspiration for her research came from outside the classroom.

“The minute Osama Bin Laden was killed and people debated using images of him, I thought ‘Someone really needs to look into this in an academic way,’” Swimelar said.

Her research will investigate the political, symbolic and strategic uses of images of political violence.

“It’s a study of what is not just images to give us information, but to analyze what the message of the image is,” she said. “The media uses images as a political football, so I wanted to think about images in a more critical way.”

In addition to three individual faculty members, grant money was awarded to a group of Elon faculty, students and community organizations to explore perceptions of public assistance in the United States, including the Burlington area.

According to Roselle, the recipients of the grant were chosen because of this emphasis on both national and local issues. For some, this focus is invaluable.

“The Turnage Fund is an exceptional important funding initiative, at an extremely important time,” Kass said. “If you look at the connection between effective news media and democracy, it’s clear that we’re at a very critical juncture"