Sue Robinson

press release:

A Room of One's Own is delighted to welcome local professor and author Sue Robinson for a reading and book signing from her book Networked News, Racial Divides: How Power and Privilege Shape Public Discourse in Progressive Communities!

Sue Robinson (PhD, Temple University, 2007) holds the Helen Franklin Firstbrook Professor of Journalism endowed research chair at the School of Journalism & Mass Communication in the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Here she researches and teaches about digital technologies like social media, journalism studies, reporting skills, multimedia, and information authority. This is her first book, which was published in November 2017 by Cambridge University Press. She is currently at work on her second book, tentatively called Media Trust Projects Around the Globe: How Journalists Consider Citizens, Truths & Facts in a Digital Age of Fake News. She lives in Madison with her husband and two children.

About Networked News, Racial Divides: How Power and Privilege Shape Public Discourse in Progressive Communities: Against conventional wisdom, pervasive black-white disparities pair with vitriolic public conversation in politically progressive communities throughout America. Networked News, Racial Divides examines obstacles to public dialogues about racial inequality and opportunities for better discourse in mid-sized, liberal cities -- and Madison, WI, is the major focal point of the work. Taking as its case study the public talk about race in Madison, WI, from about 2011 on, the book narrates the challenges faced when talking about race through a series of stories about each community struggling with K-12 education achievement gaps. The author, media expert Sue Robinson, analyzes whose voices get heard and whose get left out. She explores how privilege shapes discourse and how identity politics can interfere with deliberation. Drawing on network analysis of community dialogues, interviews with journalists, politicians, activists, and citizens and deep case study of five cities (Madison plus Evanston, IL, Chapel Hill, NC, Ann Arbor, MI, and Cambridge, MA), this reflexive and occasionally narrative book chronicles the institutional, cultural and other problematic realities to amplifying voices of all people while also recommending strategies to move forward and build trust.