Lora Taub
Professor, Media & Communication
Dean for Digital Learning
Program Director, LVAIC Documentary Storymaking Minor
[email protected]
lorataub.com
Trexler B
Background
B.A., M.A., Ph.D. Communications, University of California, San Diego
Lora Taub's work explores the affordances of new digital media as resources for critical participation in democratic society, with a particular interest in new digital technologies and youth agency and voice. Much of her thinking on these issues emerges from her long-term ethnographic research on the socio-cultural impacts of digital media in the lives of children. Locally, she explores these relationships in the context of HYPE, a youth media program for Allentown teens that uses digital media and documentary production as tools for amplifying young people’s presence and participation in community life. This collaboration builds on earlier work between 1998 - 2001 with children and teachers in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and before that, in diverse communities in California where she was a researcher with UCLINKS, a statewide network of University of California partnerships with community organizations to promote informal learning with technology after school. She is co-editor with Sue Jansen and Jeff Pooley of Media and Social Justice (Palgrave, 2011), which includes a chapter co-authored with Media and Communication alumni Eirinn Disbrow ('10) titled, "Detours Through Youth-Driven Media: Back Seat Drivers Bear Witness to the Ethical Dilemmas of Youth Media." She teaches courses in documentary studies and production, new media literacies and new information technologies. Dr. Taub is Muhlenberg's Associate Dean of Digital Learning and the director of the LVAIC consortial Documentary Storymaking minor program.
