Brian Bowe – WWU Journalism Alumni Online

Brian J. Bowe

Associate Professor

Faculty Update

If nothing else, 2019 is shaping up to be a year of expanding international horizons for me.

As I write this, I’m living in Amman, Jordan as a Fulbright scholar. I’m teaching master’s students in the University of Jordan’s Prince Al Hussein bin Abdullah II School of International Studies. I’m also studying the Jordanian Arabic dialect, and learning how to play the oud. Amman is a fascinating and vibrant city, although the winter is turning out to be just as cold and rainy as it is in Bellingham.

In July, I’ll be heading to the World Journalism Education Congress in Paris to present three papers, all related to my current research about journalism education and curriculum design.

In August, I’ll be traveling to Tunisia with professors Joe Gosen and Carolyn Nielsen and six of our top-notch journalism students for a series of reporting workshops with faculty and students from L’Institut de Presse et des Sciences de l’Information and journalists from the Tunis-Afrique Presse wire service. We are able to embark on this project thanks to a $100,000 grant from the U.S. Embassy in Tunis. In spring, 2020, a group of Tunisians will visit Bellingham as part of the same project.

While I’ve got a lot of international work happening, I’m also conducting research back home. Washington State University’s Lawrence Pintak and I are working on a multifaceted research project about the experiences of the unprecedented number of Muslim-American candidates who ran for office in the 2018 midterm elections. This project includes a survey, an analysis of media coverage and social media traffic and interviews with candidates. Our work was honored with a Senior Scholar grant from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. I’m also working with professor Derek Moscato on research on press releases from the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

I have managed to keep up with my first love, music journalism. I recently published an article about the Jordanian/Palestinian band 47Soul in Detroit’s Metro Times alt-weekly. New editions of my young adult biographies of punk bands The Ramones and The Clash were released in January by Enslow Publishers. I wrote the original books before I went back to grad school to get my Ph.D. I’m a much better researcher now, and I was better able to access archival materials for these books, and I think the new versions are much improved.

Winter 2018 update

Of course, 2017 has been a momentous year for anybody who cares about journalism. World events have given us a lot to talk about in the classroom, and our students seem especially fired up about the importance of journalism’s civic mission. This year, I had the opportunity to teach an honors seminar on religion and news, and I took my first crack at teaching feature writing.

I’ve continued to teach senior seminar each quarter, and I have been working with colleagues in Western Libraries on a yearlong research project to help students design research projects that are more meaningful to them.

The year began for me with a couple of invitations from the League of Women Voters of Bellingham/Whatcom County to give presentations on the concept of “fake news.” In February, I gave a talk about my research into media representations of Muslims and Islam as part of Western Libraries’ reading series.

On the research front, a highlight of the year was the publication of my article, “Permitted to Build? Moral Foundations in Newspaper Framing of Mosque-Construction Controversies” in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. Another article I co-authored was a finalist for that journal’s outstanding article of 2016 award.

I have a lot of research projects in process, with a half-dozen articles undergoing peer review currently. Working with colleagues, I contributed to a book chapter about TV network news coverage of immigration and deportation narratives for the forthcoming book, “The Trump Presidency, Journalism, and Democracy.” I presented papers at the International Communication Association conference in San Diego and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in Chicago. The AEJMC conference was preceded by a tour of Chicago area sacred spaces that I organized in my role as teaching chair of the Religion and Media Interest Group.

I was awarded a research fellowship from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library & Archives and the Center for Popular Music Studies at Case Western Reserve University to conduct research on the legendary Detroit proto-punk band the MC5. I spent a week in the archives in Cleveland, and I’ll be devoting a lot of my research energies to this project in 2018. This is research that is dear to my heart, and it will be nice to get back to my music journalism roots.