Research Interests
Dr. Kristie Swain’s research and grant work has focused on risk framing of news and social media content about large-scale public threats, including viral health advice misinformation, pollution, climate change, food insecurity, bioterrorism, and HIV.
Recent projects have analyzed misleading COVID-19 advice about prevention and treatment, how “big data” can be used in automated fact checking, and how journalists and transportation officials handle freight train and truck spills.
Dr. Swain has a passion for informal science education, including the ways scientists and scholars from divergent disciplines engage in interdisciplinary communication to address grand challenges, how scientists visualize and create engaging narratives about their work, and how they communicate their discoveries through scholarly journals, grant work, social media, and news coverage. For example, a recent study examines the carbon capture innovations that have grabbed the attention of public audiences and policymakers.
Her public health work has examined how corporations frame public messages in controversial environmental justice coverage, risk framing and journalistic decisions in covering alleged bioterrorism incidents, international news flow in coverage of Sub-Saharan AIDS, and how African-American churches frame HIV prevention messages.
Biography
Dr. Kristie Swain teaches health communication, media ethics, advanced IMC writing, research methods, and theory. With a professional background in print journalism and public relations, she has written for Better Homes and Gardens, Southern Living, The Oxford Eagle, Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal in Tupelo, and the Tuscaloosa News.
Hundreds of her students have produced sustainability innovation stories for Planet Forward, as well as content and outreach strategies for more than 100 nonprofit organizations and businesses. For example, one of her classes produced a “Live the Creed” series of stories and podcasts for the UM Ombuds Office that explored aspects of campus respect, fairness, and civility. In another semester, her class promoted the UM Field Station by developing outreach strategies and materials, multimedia stories about ecology research, and audio clips about experiencing nature that the Smithsonian’s Natural History museum in DC used in a soundscape exhibit.
Dr. Swain’s scholarly work has appeared in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journal of Risk Analysis and Crisis Response, and other international journals, scholarly books, and conference proceedings.
Dr. Swain has directed a science journalism center, received a Distinguished Service Award in Sustainability at UM, and has served in leadership roles on NIH and national security grants. She is active in AEJMC and has served on numerous UM chancellor’s committees and task force groups, including the Future Planning Task Force, Undergraduate Council, University Assessment Committee, STEM Innovation Task Force, Working Group on Civility and Civil Discourse and its Academic Freedom committee, Steering Committees of the Community Wellbeing and Disaster Resilience Flagship Constellations, and the Society and Health Minor Advisory Committee.
Courses Taught
- IMC 585 Health Communication
Education
B.A. Journalism, The University of Mississippi (1988)
M.A. Journalism, The University of Alabama (1992)
Ph.D. Mass Communication, University of Florida (1999)