“Math is fun,” Professor Coleman declares, and soon all her students agree.

Cynthia-Lou Coleman, Associate Professor of Communication, analyzes how values surrounding science, health and the environment play out in news controversies. Most recently she examined those annoying advertisements that entice the viewer to “Talk to your doctor” about allergies or impotence. Proponents of the ads claim they inform consumers, but Professor Coleman argues that those types of information claims are really just disguised propaganda. She will present these findings at a national conference in August.

Similarly, science was disguised as truth in news coverage of Kennewick Man, a 9,300 year-old skeleton that survived an eight-year court battle between scientists and American Indians. In writing for the journal Science Communication, Professor Coleman and co-author Erin Dysart (a PSU alumnus) demonstrated that Indian claims were dismissed as “unscientific.” Professor Coleman’s research on news coverage of American Indians also has been published in American Studies and Media Culture & Society, and the books Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture and Communication Ethics and Universal Values.

Recently Professor Coleman was named editor of the journal of the Northwest Communication Association. The journal publishes peer-reviewed scholarship from a spectrum of communication topics. The current journal features a range of research from communication of twin siblings to Jewish identity in cinema.

Under Professor Coleman’s leadership the NWCA Journal will join more than 1,000 periodicals that are included in the online database Ebscohost. She begins a three-year term as editor in spring 2006.

Professor Coleman’s students report that she brings three elements to the classroom: enthusiasm, intensity and panache. Her passion for theory and research is evident as she encourages communication students to embrace their quantitative sides: “Math is fun,” she declares, and soon all her students agree. By throwing two over-sized dice on the table, she demonstrates how communication researchers use probabilistic statistics to measure their results.

Professor Coleman brings flair, says one of her students. Her experiences living in Europe and the Middle East afford colorful class examples, like the communication faux pas advertisers made by trying to sell refrigerators in a Moslem country using pictures of a huge white refrigerator chock full of ham. “She urges us to think and dig deeper,” said another student. “Her mantra is ‘tell me more’.”

In her Research Methods classes Professor Coleman links the campus with the community. In the fall, some 50 students worked on projects with the Portland Art Museum, examining what visitors learn from the museum and ways in which the museum can increase its community visibility. She and her students currently are working on a project, funded through the Faculty Enhancement Grants, that examines the role of social capital and mass media in community art museums.

Name: Cynthia-Lou Coleman
Title: Associate Professor of Communication
office: 29 NH
phone: (503) 725. 5368
fax: (503) 725-5385
email: ccoleman@pdx.edu