Gary Gumpert is Emeritus Professor of Communication at Queens College of the City University of New York and co-founder of Communication Landscapers, a consulting firm. He is president of the United States chapter of the International Institute of Communication. Professor Gumpert’s publications include: Talking Tombstones and Tales of the Media Age; three edited volumes of Inter/Media: Interpersonal Communication in a Media Age published by Oxford University Press. He is a recipient of the Franklyn S. Haiman Award for distinguished scholarship in Freedom of Expression. His primary research focuses on the nexus of communication technology and social relationships, particularly looking at urban and suburban development, the alteration of public space, and the changing nature of community.

Gene Burd has for 40 years taught and done research in urban communication at Texas, Minnesota and Marquette, where he served in the Center for Study of the American Press, after his Ph.D. (1964) at Northwestern, where he worked in the Center for Metropolitan Studies, after pursuing degrees in political science and journalism at Iowa and UCLA (BA, MS), where he studied on a fellowship from the Los Angeles Times, after leaving the rural Missouri Ozarks in the mid-1940s to live in East Los Angeles.

Dr. Burd was a journalist for the Kansas City Star, Houston Chronicle, Albuquerque Journal and suburban newspapers in Los Angeles and Chicago. He was an adviser to Milwaukee Mayor Henry Maier, a consultant to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Council and Denver Urban Observatory, and on the city planning information staff of Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago in the early l960s, when he was one of the last residents of Jane Addams’ Hull-House before the immigrant settlement was demolished by urban renewal.

His research on cities and media has appeared in the Journal of Urban Affairs, Nation’s Cities, National Civic Review, Urban Affairs Annual Reviews, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Mass Comm Review, Journalism Quarterly, Journalism History, and American National Biography. He has led numerous urban communication initiatives and presented research to the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the National Communication Association, the International Communication Association, as well as to scholarly groups in sociology, political and social science, cultural and minority studies.

Harvey Jassem , Ph.D., is Professor of Communication at the University of Hartford. His research focuses on communication and media policy and has appeared in a wide variety of outlets. His interest in democratizing communication opportunities, coupled with a New York City upbringing, lead naturally to an appreciation for the study of communication in urban contexts. Urban areas have traditionally been the centers for culture and idea formation/dissemination. Focusing on urban communication sheds light on both the urban contexts and the resultant communication which affects cultures and nations more broadly.

Susan J. Drucker , is a Professor in the of Department of Journalism/ Media Studies, School of Communication, Hofstra University. She is an attorney, editor of the Free Speech Yearbook, and Series editor of the Communication and Law series for Hampton Press. She is the author and editor of 6 books and over 85 articles and book chapters including Voices in the Street: Gender, Media and Public Space and two editions of Real Law @ Virtual Space: The Regulation of Cyberspace (1999, 2005) with Gary Gumpert. She is a recipient of the Franklyn S. Haiman Award for distinguished scholarship in freedom of expression. Her work examines the relationship between media technology and human factors, particularly as viewed from a legal perspective. She is a parnter in Communication Landscapers, a consulting firm.

Leo Jeffres, Ph.D. is known as an "Urban Pioneer." He is a Professor at Cleveland State University in the School of Communication. His interests include urban communication systems, technology and media effects. Dr. Jeffres is the author of several books, including: Urban Communication Systems: Neighborhoods and the Search for Community, and Mass Media Effects. The author of a hundred articles, monographs and book chapters, A former Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Jeffres has appeared in several rankings of productive scholars in communication. He placed in the top 100 most prolific scholars in communication in a study of scholarship in 24 major communication journals from 1915 to 2001.

Dr. Casey M. K. Lum’s areas of research and teaching include media ecology, media and globalization, media education, urban food cultures as communication, media ethnography, as well as Asian and Asian Pacific American media. An admirer of Lewis Mumford’s pioneering work in urban studies and the history of technical cultures, Dr. Lum’s edited book, Perspectives on Culture, Technology and Communication: The Media Ecology Tradition (Hampton, 2006), has won the Media Ecology Association’s 2006 Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics; the Korean edition of this book has been cited by the Republic of Korea’s National Academy of Science as one of the "Excellent books in the fields of social sciences in 2009." His earlier book, In Search of a Voice: Karaoke and the Construction of Identity in Chinese America (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), is an ethnographic study of how three interpretive communities of immigrants engaged in social interaction in private and public places through karaoke singing. In addition to numerous other research activities and publications, Professor Lum is currently engaged in a multinational comparative study of outdoor advertising as urban communication and urban food cultures as communication in Greater China and the Chinese diaspora.

Kevin M. Carragee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Suffolk University in Boston. His research interests include the news media definition of urban issues and problems, and struggles over contested urban space.

Greg Dickinson (Ph.D University of Southern California) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Speech Communication at Colorado State University. For over a decade, he has devoted his scholarly career to the study of space and place. His move, as a graduate student to Los Angeles focused his attention on space—the neighborhoods in which he lived were profoundly different from that in which he grew up in rural Eastern Washington. He began research on the built environment by investigating a range of twentieth-century LA landscapes. His dissertation on memory and consumer culture in LA won the Gerald R. Miller Dissertation Award from the Speech Communication Association in 1995. More recently he has turned his attention to museums and suburbs of the inter-mountain West.

All of Greg’s scholarship concerns the intersections of rhetoric, place, memory, everyday life, consumer culture, and suburbia. He investigates local, built spaces as a mode to understand the ways specific places engage individuals and to build theory about the materiality and spatiality of rhetoric. In 2007 he (along with his co-authors Brian L. Ott and Eric Aoki) won the NCA Visual Communication Division Excellence in Scholarship Award. His essays have appeared in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Southern Journal of Communication, and Western Journal of Communication. He is currently editing a book on places of memory with Carole Blair and Brian Ott. He is also completing a book on contemporary suburbs.

Dr. Cees J. Hamelink is Emeritus Professor of International Communication at the University of Amsterdam. He is currently Professor for Management of Information and Knowledge at the University of Aruba, Professor of Human Rights and Public Health at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, and Honorary Professor of the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. He is also the editor-in-chief of the International Communication Gazette and Honorary president of the International Association for Media and Communication Research. He is author of 17 monographs on communication and culture. Forthcoming with Paradigm Publishers is Conflict and Communication (2008).

Victoria Gallagher (Ph.D. Northwestern University 1990) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University. She teaches courses in rhetorical theory and criticism, communication ethics, gender and organizational communication and has been awarded both the NC State College of Humanities and Social Sciences Outstanding Teacher Award and the College’s Outstanding Advising Award. In October of 1999, Professor Gallagher was inducted into the NC State Academy of Outstanding Teachers.

Professor Gallagher has published articles in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Western Journal of Communication, Southern Communication Journal, Journal of Engineering Education and Journal of College Admissions as well as in several edited collections. She has presented numerous conference papers and been an invited respondent for panels at national and regional conferences. Her co-authored paper on the dynamics of peer interactions in engineering work teams won a Best Paper Award from the American Society of Engineering Educators. Another co-authored piece, an article on the rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr. won the Aubrey Fisher Journal Article Award, Runner Up from the Western States Communication Association.

Eric Gordon is a scholar of new media, with a special interest in place-based digital communities, social networking, and virtual environments. He has recently published articles in Space and Culture, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Information, Communication and Society. He edited a special issue of Space and Culture on the topic of “The Geography of Virtual Worlds,” exploring the ideas of how location matters even in the most virtual of conditions. And he is working on two book projects: The Possessive Spectator: Media and the American City (University of Minnesota Press) and The Place of Social Media: How Networks Think Globally and Act Locally (Blackwell). He is the co-director of Hub2 - an organization devoted to using virtual technology to engage people in the community planning process around urban developments. And he is the principal investigator of the The Digital Lyceum, an NEH funded project that seeks to build systems and practices around using and preserving digital backchannels for live events.

Dr. Daniel Makagon's teaching and research interests are in urban communication, cultural studies, ethnography, public space, media criticism, and community. His book, Where the Ball Drops: Days and Nights in Times Square, was published with University of Minnesota Press in 2004. Makagon's published articles on guerrilla art, cultural disruption, democracy, and urban life have appeared in Journal of Communication Inquiry, Southern Communication Journal, Text & Performance Quarterly, and Critical/Cultural Studies (forthcoming). He has won publication awards from the Urban Communication Foundation, the National Communication Association's Ethnography Division, and the National Communication Association's Critical/Cultural Studies Division. Makagon is also co-editor with Michael LeVan of a special issue of Text & Performance Quarterly on the seven deadly sins (January 2006). His audio documentaries have been broadcast on DocumentaryWorks.org and on public radio.

Matthew D. Matsaganis is a recovering print journalist. Before arriving at the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California, where he is currently a Ph.D. candidate, he worked as a reporter and managing editor for a variety of publications in Athens, Greece. He also worked as managing editor for two Greek-American publications based in New York City and a consultant for the publishing house Pegasus, U.S.A. In November 2001, he received a certificate of recognition from the U.S. Congress for his work as a journalist and for promoting Greek-American friendship and cooperation. Currently, Matthew is also a lecturer, and researcher on the Metamorphosis Project at the Annenberg School, at USC. His research addresses (a) neighborhood health effects (e.g., health literacy) and the role of communication in building social capital, civic engagement, and community capacity, (b) ethnic, immigrant, minority, and diasporic media production and sustainability, and (c) globalization and networked governance, particularly with regard to negotiations and peace-building (Colombia, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka). He has taught courses on Ethnic & Immigrant Media in America, Communication & Global Organizations, Organizational Behavior, Empirical Research in Communication, and on 21st Century Cosmopoles: Los Angeles, Past, Present & Future. His research has been published in the American Behavioral Scientist, Human Communication Research, the Encyclopedia of International Media and Communications, Media Ethics, and he has presented his work at a variety of academic and professional conferences. He has received scholarships from the Urban Communication Foundation, the USC Annenberg School for Communication, the United States Information Agency, and the National Foundation for Scholarships of Greece. He holds master's degrees from USC Annenberg (Los Angeles) and Emerson College (Boston), and B.A. from the Department of Mass Communication and Media of the National and Capodistrian University of Athens, Greece.

Professor John Monberg's works focuses on the cultural studies of new media technologies,qualitative research methods, and user interaction design; policy implications of new media technologies including universal access, privacy, and intellectual property; the use of advanced computer/communication technologies as contexts for urban culture, planning and decision making. In 2008, he was selected as the exceptional researcher spotlighted by the Association of Internet Researchers. And he has recently published work in The Information Society, The Journal of Technology Studies, Explorations in Media Ecology,The Southern Journal of Communication, ebr, Convergence, Communication Theory, and other communication, philosophy, and anthropology journals.