Bobbie is a Ph.D. candidate at Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland. In an interview with one of GSIG’s research chairs, Sai Datta Mikkilineni, Bobbie shares her background and experiences as a Ph.D. student and gives insight about her research agenda.
Tell us a little about your professional background/your experiences and how that led to pursuing a PhD.
I did my master’s degree in journalism at the University of Arkansas and
shortly after I finished that, I started as the Assistant Director for the Center
for Ethics and Journalism there. I was working as an instructor and doing
research with the center, and that pushed me to think about doing a Ph.D.
because I was already doing research and teaching. Then, my boss there,
Ray McCaffrey, encouraged me to go ahead and just pull the trigger, telling
me a Ph.D. would put me in a better position to do exactly what I’ve already
been doing and have an interest in.
What did you do before grad school and what made you decide to
pursue a graduate degree?
Before grad school, I studied journalism. I finished my undergraduate
degree right as a lot of newspapers were folding, closing-up, and reducing
their staffs, so my master’s was kind of a temporary move. I thought I
would just do a master’s degree for two years and wait for the job market
to get better… But while I was doing the master’s degree, I really fell in love
with doing research and pursuing some of these deeper questions that
you don’t really get to pursue as a reporter.
Please describe your research interests.
When I was doing my master’s degree, I decided that it would be interesting to look into internet memes. The 2012 election was happening at that time, and I noticed a lot of my friends shared pretty much everything through memes. At the time, though, I wasn’t really reading a lot of research about memes. There was research being done, but not at the scale that it is now. So, that’s what kind of got me interested in internet memes, memes related to politics and news media, how people frame news stories through memes or react to new stories through memes… I came to the cultural heritage bit because Maryland has a part of their program called “cognate classes” or classes that are outside of the field of journalism. And because internet memes are kind of based in a cultural theory, I thought it would be good to go to cultural anthropology.
Now, for my dissertation, I’m focusing on what queer cultural heritage
means because I’m bisexual, and I’m interested in looking at how LGBT
communities engage online with their own history and cultural heritage
through memes and how they react to news or framing news stories within
their own sort of cultural story. Hopefully, after I finish my dissertation and
graduate, I’ll be able to expand what I’m doing to other communities and
other spaces on the internet.
Talk about your some of the projects that you’ve done and what
you are planning to do next.
I’m really lucky because at Merrill, the environment is very collaborative.
And I think that’s something that really sets the school apart from other
schools. During my first semester, I had opportunities to work with
professors who were looking at Russian narratives and propaganda. I’ve
done some work on the Facebook ads from the 2016 election. And this last
summer, I worked with Sohana and a couple of other people who put
together a survey about COVID-19 — a media-use survey right as
quarantine was starting so we could get an idea of how students across
the world used media during the pandemic. We launched it globally. I think
it is interesting that we are all interacting with media at a time where, you
know, normally we’re begging students to get off the phone and stay out of
the screens for a little while and, now, we’re being told to spend our time
on online classes. It’s the opposite… So we were interested in measuring
whether or not there was a change in young people’s relationship with
media at that point. Interestingly, people reported using media roughly the
same but reported using media that they hadn’t reported before like
watching local news. For example, a lot of young students in surveys prior
to the pandemic had said that they don’t really watch local news, but when
the pandemic first started, more and more of them were tuning into local
TV broadcasts for reports about what was going on in their areas.
What are you most excited about as you pursue a Ph.D.?
I think research is really exciting, getting a chance to experiment with different kinds of research… I’ve really had a chance to expand what I’ve done. But I also like teaching. I’m growing as a teacher at Merrill, and it has been really rewarding.
What tips or advice do you have for incoming grad students?
Graduate school is about time management, ultimately. It’s not really
about anything else. If you can figure out how to manage your time well,
you’ll be successful in graduate school. Or at least you’ll be successful
and happy in graduate school. I guess I should say, I know a lot of people
who don’t manage their time, who are still going to graduate, but they’re
also miserable. So, I would say it’s an exercise of time management,
figuring out how to balance the workload of teaching, as well as doing
research and classes. It’s also important to find good allies when you’re
in a graduate program. So, figuring out who those supportive faculty
members who will listen to you are. And they may not always be the big
name that you came there to study with, you know, it might surprise you.
I would say: be open to working with professors that maybe you thought
you didn’t have anything in common with or you thought were not going
align with your research interests.They may still be your biggest
supporters. So, I would say those two things, finding good, supportive
faculty and time management.
Finally, something fun about yourself or something that others
would not know?
My go-to fact that most people are surprised to find is that I used to play
roller derby. I used to escape for a roller derby team in northwest
Arkansas. It was a very short-lived roller derby career, and I’ve not played
since I started the Ph.D. I thought I would be able to do both, but I
haven’t been able to. It’s been too time consuming to do the degree, but
maybe after I graduate, I can join a derby team again.
