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Emma Bedor Hiland

Throughout the semester, we’re introducing our new additions to the Saint Rose faculty.

Dr. Emma Bedor Hiland

Title: Assistant professor of communications

Previous position: Lecturer, College of Media and Communication, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas

Education: Ph.D. communication studies, concentration in bioethics

Teaching at Saint Rose: introduction to mass media; communication and culture; communication law.

Academic specialty: Health, media, and technology

Where are you from and how did you become interested in communications?

I was born and raised in central New Jersey. I moved to Ithaca, New York, where I completed high school. I attended SUNY at Geneseo. I planned on going into broadcast journalism. I had had a radio production internship during high school, and thought I would enjoy working in news.

However, once I began taking college courses, I realized that what I really enjoyed was researching and learning about media – more so than creating it. To me, being able to have a career where I could think of questions about media’s effects and influence seemed really exciting. Communication was a field where I was encouraged to pursue my interest in popular culture’s social and cultural effects, and I was fortunate that a faculty member nurtured my interests and taught me how to write a publishable research article.

Together, we authored my first peer-reviewed paper, examining People magazine’s depictions of celebrity mothers’ postpartum weight-loss narratives, and how they create problematic beliefs among members of the general public about what noncelebrity women are expected to do after having children (i.e., that they are supposed to “bounce back” to their pre-baby bodies very quickly). I enjoyed that process so much that decided that I wanted to continue learning in an academic setting.

I then attended Penn State, where I earned a master’s in media studies and minored in women’s studies. After that, I earned my Ph.D. in communication studies from the University of Minnesota, where I also developed a specialization in bioethics. For those of us with an interest in health, sickness, disability, or what is considered normal, bioethics encourages us to think about how medicine and research are practiced.

Please tell us about your own academic scholarship.

My overarching interest in health, media, and technology has remained the same, but there are many different topics that I have studied and published about. I have written about women’s reproductive health, pharmaceutical advertising, research ethics, media representations of health and illness, how emotions are spread in online spaces, and most recently a book titled “Therapy Tech: The Digital Transformation of Mental Healthcare.”

That project examines technologies whose proponents claim they are improving user mental health, or at the very least, the public’s ability to access mental healthcare services. Yet, I show that those claims are largely unfounded, since the tools remain unavailable to underserved populations, and their technological design reflects that they are best suited for the same populations that already receive the highest levels of mental healthcare services.

How will you use your work to strengthen the experience here at Saint Rose?

I come to my research with an orientation toward social justice and trying to find ways my writing can improve the communities that I care about. Showing students that scholarship can make a positive difference in the world helps them see that what we learn in the classroom is interconnected to what happens in the real world, and that they can use research (or the skills needed for research) to pursue their own goals. When students see that they can become the creators of knowledge it is an empowering and transformative experience for them.

Why is the communications field particularly important for students these days – whether or not they major in it?

Communication is a field with room for all types of questions. Fundamentally, I explain it as a discipline about exploring how meaning is made. It is a broad field, because there are so many dimensions to meaning. We can think about media messages, business, professional, or group contexts, the internet and social media, the effects of news and journalism, how romantic partners and family members interact … the list goes on and on. The benefit of being broad is that there is always room for students to find a way to include their interests in their studies.

What drew you to Saint Rose?

I am someone who benefitted immensely from a liberal arts education and having the ability to work closely with professors who took the time to nurture my own growth and interests. Saint Rose is a place where that same educational model is highly valued, and I am so excited to have the opportunity to work closely with students in an environment where students are encouraged to think critically, generate questions about the world, and work with faculty to learn more and find answers to those questions. I’m also very happy to be back in New York and the Northeast!

What interest would you would like to pursue here in upstate New York?

I love to garden, and living in west Texas, it was difficult to make flowers (and even my lawn!) grow. I’m so excited to be able to get back to spending more time outdoors, whether gardening or hiking. There is so much beautiful, publicly-accessible land here, and being in the Albany area means I can also go to the Adirondacks quite easily.