Overview
These essays briefly review the readings for a given Topic, and connect that material to other readings and/or entertainment media (of your choice). This class is Affect and Emotion in Political Communication. Do not strive away from this topic.
In addition:
Essays MUST include a discussion of at least one of the required readings.They can in addition include a discussion of (a) other required readings from the syllabus, (b) optional readings from the syllabus, and/or (c) academic readings or other material that you have found yourself.
There is a fair bit of flexibility in terms of the content of the paper. The objective is to use the readings in some interesting way. Do not use your essay to just to list the contents of readings — you can describe the readings briefly, but your aim is to then discuss that reading in relation to other published research. So you could, for instance compare arguments or methods across academic papers. You could use academic papers to help explain recent media content or news coverage. You could do both!
Generally speaking, an essay that does a good job of (briefly) describing a required readings, and then connects that reading effectively to other research (and perhaps also current affairs) will receive a grade of 8 or above.
Required reading (must use this one) : Dunaway, J., & Searles, K. (2023). News and Democratic Citizens in the Mobile Era. Oxford University Press. Chapters 1, 2, 6, & 8.
Can choose between any of these but only use one:
Park, C. S. (2015). “Applying “Negativity Bias” to Twitter: Negative News on Twitter, Emotions, and Political Learning.” Journal of Information Technology & Politics 12(4): 342–359.
Brady, W. J., Wills, J. A., Jost, J. T., Tucker, J. A., & Bavel, J. J. V. (2017). “Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114(28): 7313–7318.
León, E. de, & Trilling, D. (2021). “A Sadness Bias in Political News Sharing? The Role of Discrete Emotions in the Engagement and Dissemination of Political News on Facebook.” Social Media + Society 7(4): 205630512110597.
Lee, S., Rojas, H., & Yamamoto, M. (2022). “Social Media, Messaging Apps, and Affective Polarization in the United States and Japan.” Mass Communication and Society 25(5): 673–697.
Find a current news article to relate the required reading (Dunaway, J., & Searles, K.) to one of the four readings you have chosen from the list above. Do not use outside sources other than a credible current news article. No plagarism and no AI, this assignment will go through a detector. I will upload all 5 of the sources, again you will only use two of them, the required one and the one that will choose out of the 4 above.