Employee Directory

Robert MacDougall Professor
Communication

Robert C. MacDougall ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/rcmacdougall) is Professor of Media Studies in the Communication Department.  He was the inaugural coordinator of the Faculty Center for Professional Development & Curriculum Innovation at Curry.  His teaching and research centers on the cognitive, social, and epistemological roles played by communication media and technology today and through history.

Dr. MacDougall's first book,  Cultural Technics: Making Meaning at the Interfaces of Oral and Electronic Culture (2009) is an elaboration of his doctoral research that interrogates the use of email by a group of Mohawk Indians.  His second book,  Digination: Identity, Organization and Public Life in the Age of Small Digital Devices and Big Digital Domains, and an edited volume entitled  Drugs and Media: New Perspectives on Communication, Consumption and Consciousness were both published in 2012.  A second edited volume, published in 2015, entitled Communication and Control: Tools, Systems and New Dimensions, extends core arguments found in his previous work related to emerging cybernetic relationships between human biological and technological systems. 

Before coming to Curry, Dr. MacDougall taught at the University at Albany, Allegheny College, and Emerson College.  He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters related to organizational communication, communication theory, the rhetoric and history of science, and new media as perceptual and environmental systems. More recent investigations incorporate EEG and other neuro-physiological apparatuses to better understand some of the interactions and effects associated with multimedia use. 

A selected list of published work follows:

MacDougall, Robert (2019). “The Action Is at the Interface: Philip K. Dick as Interologist (or, how I learned to stop worrying and trust the Liminal Imaginary of PKD)". China Media Research. Vol. 15. Number 4.

MacDougall, Robert (2017). 'Re-mapping the Mind: a probe into the nature and extent of mind.'  Review of Communication. 17:4, 320-341.

MacDougall, Robert (2015). "Lucretius' De Rerum Natura: a media ecological template."  Explorations in Media Ecology.  Vol. 14, No. 1+2.

MacDougall, Robert (2014). "The Ecological Approach of JJ Gibson."  Explorations in Media Ecology.  Vol. 12, No. 3+4.

MacDougall, Robert (2011). "Podcasting and Political Life."  American Behavioral Scientist.  Vol. 55, No. 6

MacDougall, Robert (2011). "eBay Ethics: simulating civility today for the 'digital democracy' of tomorrow."   Convergence:  The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies.  May.  Vol. 16 No. 2.  235-244.

MacDougall, Robert (2008). "Web Search Engineering and our Emerging Information Ecologies: designing and defining authority online."   Explorations in Media Ecology.  Vol. 7, No. 2.

MacDougall, Robert (2006). "Remaking the Real Man: Erectile Dysfunction Palliatives and the Social Re-Construction of the Male HeteroSexual Life Cycle."  Sexuality and Culture. Vol. 10, No. 2.

MacDougall, Robert (2005). "Identity, Electronic Ethos and Blogs: a technologic analysis of symbolic exchange on the new news medium."  American Behavioral Scientist.  Vol. 49, No. 3. 

MacDougall, Robert (2000) "Subject fields, Oral Emulation, and the Spontaneous Cultural Positioning of Mohawk E-mail Users." World Communication, 4, 28; pp. 5-25 .

Branislav Kovacic, Robert MacDougall and Donald Cushman (1996). "Prying Open the Window of Opportunity: some rhetorical and social scientific dynamics to argumentation."  Communication Theory 6, 4, pp. 361-3 73.

Book Chapters:

"Seeing in, and out, to the Extended Mind: an EEG analysis of Page and Screen Reading."  Chapter 7 in Neuroscience and Media: New Understandings and Representations, Edited by Michael Grabowski.  Routledge, 2015.

"eBay Ethics: Simulating Civility in One of the New Digital Democracies,"  Chapter 1 in The Ethics of Emerging Media: Information, Social Norms, and New Media Technology. Kathleen German and Bruce Druschel, Eds. Continuum, 2011 .

Donald Cushman, Robert MacDougall and Branislav Kovacic (1997).  "An Attempt to Contribute to the Rhetoric of Science Movement: From Monologue to Dialogue" in Transgressing Scientific Discourses: Communication and the Voice of Other. Michael Huspek and Gary Radford, eds. SUNY Press.

Artur Czynzcyk, Robert MacDougall, Krzystof Objoy (1997). "Lessons Communicating Change in Transition: Some Dilemmas and Strategic Choices" in Lessons from the Recession: a management and strategic communication perspective. Sara S. Kind and Donald P. Cushman eds. SUNY Press.