Trial by fire

By Joe Arney
Photos by Hannah Howell

The PhD student’s journey is about learning—not just about the subject that most interests them, but about themselves, and whether they possess the mettle to overcome the rigors of research and teaching.

Part of Anna Turner’s struggle was finding a program that would encourage her to explore her dual interests in the quantitative and critical approaches to media studies.

But the real challenge came halfway in, when she lost virtually all of her work in a fire.

“I knew it was going to take me longer than most students to finish the program, because my dissertation is a little ambitious,” said Turner (PhDMediaSt’25), who graduated from the College of Media, Communication and Information at CU Boulder in May. “But basically, I lost my fourth and fifth year rebuilding everything.”

Turner was staying with her boyfriend over spring break when another unit in the building caught fire. They fled with their pets; while the unit itself didn’t burn, water from the fire hoses damaged the technology that was left behind.

And while her work was backed up to a cloud drive, that was also lost when she turned in a borrowed computer two months after the fire. A technician accidentally deleted the cloud backup, instead of just wiping her local profile from the machine.

“The experience taught me how resilient I am,” she said. “Because every time I tell the story to another PhD, they’re like, ‘Wow, I would have quit.’”

More assignments for a top teacher

Turner credited CMCI and its media studies department with supporting her through the worst, including finding teaching assignments and other opportunities to fund her journey. The extra teaching duties benefited both Turner and the college, said Rick Stevens, then the chair of the media studies department.

“Anna never seems to get flustered, no matter what is thrown at her,” said Stevens, now associate dean of undergraduate education at CMCI. “She always finds a way to not just come through, but come through in a way that best serves our undergraduate students.”

Faculty support amounted to more than just financial support when her graduate funding ran out. It started when she was applying to schools—and being told to narrow her focus. Few media studies doctoral programs specialize in both social sciences and culture studies work; more than a few admissions offices were impressed with Turner’s credentials, but warned her to pick a lane.

“CU was one of the few places that didn’t try to change me,” she said. “I got accepted and the director called and said, ‘How can I get you to come here?’ And everything I had imagined about Colorado came to fruition when I visited—it was everything I wanted, academically and socially.”

Turner’s advisor, Stewart M. Hoover, was among the people who challenged her, rather than changing her.

“You got a sense from Anna right away that she had the moxie to stick through a long and arduous doctoral program,” said Hoover, an emeritus professor of media studies who has worked in both the quantitative and qualitative spaces. “I wanted to encourage her because I felt she had the background, knowledge and drive to do something special.”

While it meant a longer program and more work on her part, Turner’s quantitative-meets-critical work hasn’t been a hindrance. In fact, she was among the 10 finalists at the university’s annual Three-Minute Thesis competition, where PhD students showcase their work and its impact to a nontechnical audience under strict time limits.

Turner’s work looks at polarization from the standpoints of both popular culture and social media. She devised surveys based on scenes from TV shows and social media posts to understand how people reacted to different messages—important because, when it comes to polarization in the media, most research has focused on the media we choose to watch, such as the different audiences for Fox News or MSNBC.

In interpreting her results, she found a lot of broad agreement about topics that fuel the media culture wars—surprising, but then, the business model of media and tech titans relies on driving users into different camps.

“The algorithms create echo chambers that we’re not selecting on our own,” she said. In a sense, we are—our feeds are built from what we like and don’t—“but the algorithms are doing the work for us, as opposed to when we just had cable news to choose from. We’re getting our news from algorithms, rather than from what we choose with popular culture.”

‘It’s a back and forth’

That’s worth studying because popular culture’s ability to influence is well documented. For instance, adding gay and lesbian characters to primetime television shows in the 1990s played a role in the mainstream public eventually becoming more supportive of same-sex marriage.

“Popular media imitates culture, but culture also imitates popular media. It’s a back and forth,” she said. “The idea that exposure to people we haven’t seen before can change our views is really interesting to me.”

A logical place to take this kind of work would be to a streaming service, to study how exposure to ideas can mitigate, rather than exacerbate, polarization. That’s her dream job.

“There’s a lot of nuance to my work that still needs to be pulled out,” Turner said. “I hope to do the kind of social experiments that help us examine how we introduce people to characters and story arcs, and how those play out beyond just a short clip you see as part of a survey.”

Hoover, her advisor, said that direction lines up with the values-based impact she wants her research to create.

“She has a set of ideas about the way we should live together as a society, and the way our politics ought to represent and express that,” he said. “I’m excited to see how she uses her research to promote that more helpful, more generalized view of what we as a society share in common.”