Media Contact: Dolores Davies, (619) 534-5994

The ways in which the practices and ideals of citizen involvement in politics have changed from colonial times to the present will the subject of a lecture to be given by Sociologist Michael Schudson at 4 p.m., April 28 in Hojel Hall of the Institute of the Americas Complex at the University of California, San Diego.

Schudson, a UCSD professor of communication and sociology and the author of The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (Free Press, 1998), is one of the nation’s top authorities on political communication and the culture of the news media. His lecture, The Social Transformation of American Citizenship, is the first in a series of Faculty Research Lectures sponsored by the San Diego Division of the Academic Senate. The lecture, free and open to the public, will be followed immediately by a reception.

A prolific and insightful social scientist and communications expert, Schudson will highlight aspects of his recent book, The Good Citizen.

"Current criticism about civic decline and civic disengagement is often based on mistaken, nostalgic images of the American past," Schudson says. "I argue that civic life today, both its problems and its strengths, represents less a falling away from some unchanging ideal of what a good citizen should be than the awkwardness of a historical moment poised between different ideals and different practices."

Among Schudson’s other books are The Power of News (1995), Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (1992), and Rethinking Popular Culture (1991). He has also contributed to a wide range of scholarly journals and magazines.

Most recently, Schudson was named as co-director of the UCSD Civic Collaborative, a new endeavor launched by the university to facilitate a dialogue between the San Diego community and the UCSD faculty through community-oriented research and teaching.