Centers
The College of Media, Communication and Information is home to several internationally recognized centers of academic excellence that provide valuable new research and insight on contemporary issues.
Center for Communication and Democratic Engagement
The Center for Communication and Democratic Engagement (formerly called BoulderTalks) seeks to foster community and knowledge through democratic engagement. Through teaching, research and outreach we promote communication practices that embody democratic values, such as inclusion, participation and mutual benefit. Center for Communication and Democratic Engagement encourages thoughtful reflection on how we communicate about cultural crises, conflicts and challenges through democratic practices like debate, dialogue, deliberation and performance.
Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media
Serves as a forum to advance documentary practice as an aesthetically and socially responsive art form through research and experimentation.
Center for Environmental Journalism
Through the Center for Environmental Journalism, CMCI seeks to enrich public understanding of environmental issues by elevating the quality, range and depth of coverage by journalists. The center does this by helping seasoned and emerging journalists enhance their knowledge of the scientific, economic, political, and social aspects of these issues. The center also is a leading hub for journalistic reporting on environmental issues and research at the intersection of media, environment and society.
The centerpiece of the CEJ’s educational efforts is a master's degree with an emphasis in environmental journalism. Students in the program frequently work with CEJ faculty on stories for major outlets and they have growing opportunities to travel to places like the Arctic to report on important issues like climate change. The CEJ also has been building a doctoral community for students interested in researching media and the environment, media and scientific communication, risk communication, and corollary fields.
The Ted Scripps Fellowships in Environmental Journalism are at the heart of the CEJ’s professional development efforts. As part of the fellowship program, five journalists spend nine months at the University of Colorado auditing classes; working on long-term, in-depth journalistic projects and reflecting on critical questions — all without the pressure of deadlines.
Center for Media, Religion and Culture
The Center for Media, Religion and Culture conducts groundbreaking research and promotes innovative teaching at the intersection of religion, media and public life. It is one of very few institutions worldwide dedicated to academic research, teaching and public outreach in this rapidly emerging field. It brings together national and international scholars, students, professionals and the general public at its widely attended conferences, seminars and workshops.
The center has received major funding from foundations in the U.S. and abroad to support its work, including the Lilly Endowment, Ford Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, The Social Science Research Council and the Schichtung Porticus Foundation.
Over the years, the center has become a significant, internationally recognized research institution attracting visiting scholars from abroad and first-rate graduate students interested in the multidisciplinary study of mediated religion. CMRC finds a natural home and partner in the new College of Media, Communication and Information as a unique and effective platform to foster its teaching mission and its multidisciplinary scholarship on the impact of communication technologies on social and cultural change.
Media Archaeology Lab
The Media Archaeology Lab houses the largest collection in North America of still functioning media from the early 20th century through the 21st century. Everything in the lab is meant to be turned on and played with. From phonograph plays and magic lanterns, to typewriters, word processors, early computers from the 1970s through the 2000s, the lab gives students, researchers, and artists the rare opportunity to have hands-on access to historically important devices of all kinds. The lab believes that having the opportunity to experience how things were can help to envision how things could be.
The lab is generously supported by CMCI and the Department of English.
NEST Studio for the Arts
Nature, Environment, Science & Technology (NEST) Studio for the Arts is part of the larger campuswide Grand Challenge initiative and is open to all CU Boulder students, faculty, staff, campus units and community partners. CU Boulder is home to some of the top arts, Earth and space science graduate programs in the country. NEST explores the interrelation, generative overlaps and productive differences between these respective arts-based and science-based disciplines.
NEST seeks projects that engage with central questions of how methodologies within the sciences can inform artists and their appraoch to art making. In turn, what can contemporary art practice reveal about science to scientists? How can we use the practice of art to directly inform the practice of science, and vise versa? What central assumptions in scientific training might be challenged by approaches employed by the arts and humanities?
Spearheaded by Co-Investigators Erin Espelie (Assistant Professor, Film Studies Program and Department of Critical Media Practices) and Tara Knight (Associate Professor, Department of Critical Media Practices), NEST is a cross-campus network of faculty, students, centers and campus units that combine artistic practice and scientific research that explores our common and disparate ways of observing, recording, experimenting and knowing.