Rebecca de Souza
Education:
Ph. D.: Department of Communication, Purdue University, Indiana, 2007
Master of Arts: Department of Communication, Purdue University, Indiana, 2003
Bachelor of Arts: Mount Carmel College, Bangalore University, Bangalore, India, 1999
Personal Statement:
I joined the Communication Faculty at UMD in the fall of 2007. I teach and research within the fields of health communication and the media. I am “ethnically” from Goa, India, but have lived most of my life in Bangalore, a city in the south-central India. In 2007, after many long years, I completed a Ph.D. in Communication from Purdue University, Indiana. The goal of my research program is enhance understandings of the emancipatory potential of communication by documenting the interplay of culture, structure, and agency in global and local health contexts. I use qualitative methodologies and a creative mix of critical, interpretive, and post-positivistic lenses to study communicative spaces of interaction. My current site of study is community-based HIV/AIDS programs in South India. My teaching interests include health communication, health campaigns, community empowerment for health, media and society, media effects, culture and health, globalization, and qualitative research methods.
Courses Taught:
Public/ Presentational Speaking
Small group communication
Health Communication
Health Campaigns
Media Effects
Globalization
Personal webpage: http://www.d.umn.edu/~rdesouza/
Representative Research:
de Souza, R. (2007). The construction of HIV/AIDS in Indian newspapers: A frame analysis. Health Communication, 21(3), 257–266.
Dutta-Bergman, M. & de Souza, R. (2008). Reconciling the past and present: Reflexivity in the critical-cultural approach to health campaigns. Health Communication, 23 (4), 326- 339.
de Souza, R. & Dutta, M. (2008). Global and local networking for HIV/AIDS prevention: The case of the Saathii E-Forum. Journal of Health Communication, 13 (4), 326–344.
de Souza, R. (in press). Creating “communicative spaces”: A case of NGO community-organizing for HIV/AIDS. Health Communication