Stephanie Gibson
professor emerita
Klein Family School of Communications Design
Contact Information:
E-mail: sgibson@ubalt.edu
Ph.D., M.A., B.A., New York University
I like to think that my job as a teacher is to help people learn how to stand in another place. It's important for students to be able to imagine worldviews other than their own. In the classroom, I ask students to bring into their conscious awareness all the subconscious assumptions they've made about the world and examine them anew. I believe that the best education teaches people to pay attention and ask interesting questions.
My doctorate is in media ecology, and my particular interest is in the interaction between communication environments and cultural assumptions. I specialize in television but also consider the enormous variety of activities in other arenas.
My publications range from the Hampton Press anthology The Emerging Cyberculture: Literacy, Pardigm and Paradox to the article "Knowing the Score: Women as Baseball Fans." I also co-edited Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment , now in its second edition. I am currently editing an anthology about the political, social and economic implications of breastfeeding.
I was honored to receive the University's distinguished chair for service for my efforts to abolish the death penalty. I serve as chair of the board of Maryland's statewide organization and have served on the boards of several national abolitionist organizations. The late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall said that when people really understood what was happening with the death penalty, it would be abolished. I believe that day is within sight.