LSU’s Manship School Welcomes New Media Law Professor to Its Faculty

April 12, 2018

Baton Rouge, LA – Criminal justice and digital technology scholar Fanny Ramirez will join LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication in fall 2019. She will serve as an assistant professor and teach classes in media law and information communication technologies.

“We are thrilled to welcome Fanny to our faculty,” Martin Johnson, dean of the Manship School, said. “Her wide range of research expertise and strong academic background will offer our students a unique learning perspective on the role of communications in law, criminal justice and digital technologies.”

Ramirez is currently a teaching and research assistant in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, where she is completing her Ph.D. in communication, and where she previously earned her master’s degree in communication & information studies. Ramirez also holds a master’s degree in English and a bachelor’s degree in English & French from the University of Texas at Arlington.

Ramirez’s research examines the role of digital media in the criminal justice system with an eye toward issues of social justice, inequality, privacy and surveillance. Her work in this area has focused on police-community relations and the use of digital evidence in criminal case processing. She also conducts research on online communities and video games.

Ramirez won the Top Paper Award in the Applied Communication Division at the 2018 National Communication Association annual convention for her paper, “Communication Privacy Management and Digital Evidence in a Domestic Violence Felony Case.” She also won the Distinguished Achievement as a Teaching Assistant Award at Rutgers for her outstanding accomplishments in her position.

In addition to her award-winning research paper, Ramirez wrote numerous publications across several top communication journals. A sample of these publications include “Social media affordances in the context of police transparency: An analysis of the first public archive of police body camera videos” in the Journal of Applied Communication Research and “Guilty by visible association: Socially mediated visibility in gang prosecutions” in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, both published in 2018.” She has also authored several book chapters addressing social value in mobile video games and friendship practices in massively multiplayer online games.

For more information, contact smalin@lsu.edu. 

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LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication ranks among the strongest collegiate communication programs in the country, with its robust emphasis on media and public affairs. It offers undergraduate degrees in public relations, journalism, political communication, digital advertising and pre-law, along with four graduate degree programs: master of mass communication, Ph.D. in media and public affairs, certificate of strategic communication, and dual MMC/law degree. Its public relations students were recently ranked the #1 team in the nation, and its digital advertising and student media teams frequently earn national recognition.