Marisa Smith
Assistant Professor of Advertising and Public Relations | Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, UNITED STATES
Marisa Smith's research investigates news disseminated in digital environments and the sociopolitical influence of these messages.
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Biography
Dr. Marisa A. Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Advertising + Public Relations and the School of Journalism. Her research investigates news disseminated in digital environments and the sociopolitical influence of these messages. Her work highlights that a critical component for understanding the political implications of digital information environments is examining its implications for racial perceptions. Through investigating the effects of socially mediated messages on stereotype endorsement, public policy support, political polarization, civic engagement, and political opinion, her work assesses the implications of digital information environments on democracy.
Dr. Smith addresses her research questions using a variety of quantitative research methods, including computational methods (e.g., text analysis, supervised machine learning), content analyses, surveys, and experiments. Her work has been published in New Media & Society and Social Media + Society.
Dr. Smith received her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Industry Expertise (2)
Research
Education/Learning
Areas of Expertise (6)
Race
Social Media
Crime News
Politics
Activism
Computational Social Science
Accomplishments (2)
The Karl R. Wallace Award (professional)
2019
Top Reviewer, International Communication Association (professional)
2018 Mass Communication Division
Education (3)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Ph.D., Communication 2020
The Ohio State University: M.A., Communication 2015
California State University, Sacramento: B.S., Criminal Justice 2013
Affiliations (3)
- International Communication Association
- National Communication Association
- Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
Links (2)
News (1)
Facebook changes its corporate name to Meta: MSU professors react
The State News online
2021-11-29
Assistant professor of advertising and public relations Marisa Smith agrees with Huddleston that this was a PR move. Smith sees it as a distraction and a way to reorient the conversation from their misinformation controversies.
Event Appearances (3)
Biased racial (mis)representations and news frames on social media
National Communication Association Annual Meeting Baltimore, MD
The perils of disinformation: Racial stereotyping, continued influence effect, and affective political polarization
National Communication Association Annual Meeting Baltimore, MD
Selective sharing on social media: examining the effects of race-related disparate impact frames on intentions to retrans- mit news stories among U.S. college students
International Communication Association Annual Meeting Washington, DC
Research Grants (3)
Barrow Minority Doctoral Student Scholarship
AEJMC Communication, Theory & Methodology Division $2000
2019
The Ruth Anne Clark Student Scholar Award
University of Illinois, Department of Communication $1000
2019
President’s Research in Diversity Travel Award
Vice President for Academic Affairs $600
2017
Journal Articles (3)
‘There will be screen caps’: the role of digital documentation and platform collapse in propagation and visibility of racial discourses
Information, Communication & Society2022 Digital technologies facilitate the existence of online spaces where understandings about race and racial inequality are co-created and contested as part of social networks and within the context of existing power relations and social identities. This project qualitatively explores US college students’ exposure to and experiences with content on social media that they consider to be related to race and racial discrimination. Based on analysis of focus groups, we highlight the role of digital documentation, mediated spillover, and platform collapse as key processes in propagation and communication visibility of racial discourses. We begin by delineating first level-digital documentation that digitally captures local campus and national events from second-level digital documentation – the copying of already digitized content (e.g., via screenshotting).
Can Social Media News Encourage Activism? The Impact of Discrimination News Frames on College Students’ Activism Intentions
Social Media + Society2020 The marginalization of African Americans is a pervasive issue in American society. As African Americans are left on the fringes of economic, social, and political resources, social media news offers the potential for motivating action that combats the institutional policies contributing to societal disparities. Utilizing the lens of the Anger Activism Model (AAM), this experiment recruited undergraduate participants (N = 198) and tested the effects of implicit and explicit discrimination news frames on activism intentions. The findings indicate that news frames directly impact reported levels of activism intentions among college students. Unexpectedly, we found racial differences in perceptions of whether the news stories involved racial discrimination. The implications of these findings are discussed considering social media news, marginalization, and activism among college students.
Selective sharing on social media: Examining the effects of disparate racial impact frames on intentions to retransmit news stories among US college students
New Media & Society2019 Theoretical and empirical evidence suggests disparate racial impact frames may lead to selective sharing on social media and result in differential retransmission rates across racial groups. In this online study, we (1) examined reported exposure to and sharing of content about race on social media among Black, White, and “Other” race/ethnicity college students (N = 150); (2) experimentally tested how exposure to news story previews with control, implicit, or explicit disparate racial impact frames affected subsequent sharing intentions; and (3) explored reasons students provided for their intentions to share/not share the stories. Black students reported more exposure to and sharing of content about race on social media. Few participants cited discrimination in open-ended responses explaining sharing/non-sharing intentions. Nevertheless, despite holding story topic and source constant, disparate racial impact frames resulted in differences in sharing intentions among Black and White students, demonstrating these frames can influence selective sharing intentions.
