Scholars and local leaders discuss building healthier communities

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit our community, Champaign-Urbana Public Health District Administrator Julie Pryde and her team of public health workers knew they had to get creative to reach vulnerable populations. “Our communications infrastructure is really people. It starts there. We had to get messages out about COVID to all different communities. It was not enough to just translate information into different languages. We needed staff that could speak the language and come from the communities we are working with. We had to know how and where they communicate,” Pryde explained.

The administrator directed her staff, “However you normally reach out to your communities, reach out to them about COVID-19.”

In addition to traditional media like television and newspaper ads, the staff employed tactics like creating audio and video clips for WhatsApp, stapling notices to food packages and syringe exchange bags, and placing ads on Grindr, a location-based social networking application geared towards gay and bisexual men, and transgender people.

Pryde shared her insights during the panel discussion, “Media, Technology, Infrastructure, and Community: Building a Connected Communication Ecosystem for Social Good.”

On March 28, experts from four diverse yet interdependent domains discussed what it takes to foster a holistic communication ecosystem that effectively addresses the multifaceted challenges of our times.

In an era marked by rapid technological advances and evolving societal needs, forging meaningful connections across media, technology, infrastructure, and community is imperative. The COVID-19 pandemic makes a great case study for that point.

Cherie Avent, Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, expanded on Pryde’s point. “In my work as an evaluator and researcher, when I think about infrastructure, it’s very much around the relational aspect,” she explained. “Much of my work is in the STEM education context, but also working with communities, oftentimes communities that have been marginalized in many ways.”

 Avent discussed her work with local churches during COVID-19, “The pastors were the source of credibility. They were the ones leading on the ground with their congregants,” she explained.

 Avent emphasized that it took time to build those relationships, “And then asking them [the pastors] the question of what is needed is the most important thing we are learning, especially when working with communities.”

Itzhak Yanovitzky, Professor of Communication and Public Health and Chair of the SC&I Health and Wellness Faculty Cluster at Rutgers University, who has written a paper on communication infrastructure as a social determinant of health, underscored how important these relationships are.

"Communication at the community level is not just about transmitting and exchanging information. It's also about building and maintaining relationships and partnerships, facilitating collective sense-making, and enabling a public dialogue. It's also a critical component of mobilizing and coordinating collective actions, and therefore of community agency and resilience. A robust communication infrastructure, including universal access to information technologies, is needed to enable such key functions,"  Yanovitzky explained.

Creating these opportunities for people to engage with trustworthy information becomes especially important with the increasing variety of sources people through which people access information. Mike Zhengyu Yao, Professor of Digital Media and Director of the Institute of Communications Research, who moderated the discussion also asked the panelists to talk about media fragmentation, noting “Media has changed so much in the last two decades. There is a lot of infrastructure set up in the mass communication model, but the reality is we are getting information from multiple sources (TikTok, websites, etc.). How is this fragmentation impacting communications?”

The panelists discussed how this media fragmentation has significantly changed audiences, who are no longer passive recipients of information. In addition to being able to select the sources they believe to be credible and to interpret the information they receive; they have the power to create information or even to edit information shared by others. This has led to proliferation of misinformation (incorrect or inaccurate information) and disinformation (intentionally false information and conspiracy theories).

The panel also focused on what universities and researchers can do to bridge the gaps that allow for misinformation and disinformation to flourish.   

“One of the things that’s really important is to make research findings public and to start a social conversation. It’s not easy, but it is incumbent upon us to ask questions and phrase things in such a way that the public can engage with the information and become part of the discussion,” said Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Media Systems and Industries at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

The panelists agreed that creating mechanisms for engagement, such as education-research-practice partnerships, is essential. These partnerships facilitate the exchange of knowledge and expertise between academia and the community, leading to more informed decision-making and action at both levels. Additionally, incentivizing community engagement within universities can encourage researchers to prioritize building these relationships and working directly with community members.

“These are the real heroes, the real experts right here,”  Yanovitzky said, pointing to Pryde. He continued, “During the pandemic, public health departments did not have a choice but to innovate on the fly. It’s our responsibility as researchers to talk with them and find out what they did and then collect that so that we can find best practices.”

Dr. Brandi Barnes, IHSI’s Research Scientist for Health Equity, and one of the organizers of the event, thought the panelists did a wonderful job of emphasizing how  important it is to cultivate education-research-practice partnerships. “Building long-term, reciprocal relationships with the community is key. By demonstrating consistency, reliability, and genuine care for the community's well-being, universities can build trust and foster meaningful partnerships that benefit everyone involved,” she said.

The panel was hosted by the School of Information Sciences, Department of Communication, Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising, the Institute of Communications Research, and the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. Around forty attendees from 14 units across campus attended the panel discussion.