Dr. Russell Newman serves as Chair of Emerson College's Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts, where he is also Associate Professor.
There, he additionally leads the Emerson Emerging Technology Initiative. He served as President of the Emerson College chapter of the American Association of University Professors from 2020-2024 and as Co-Coordinator of the Union for Democratic Communications, where he still serves as Treasurer. His work explores the intersections of the political economies of communication and surveillance, neoliberalism, the epistemological foundations of media policymaking, and activism surrounding communications policy. He is the author of The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities (MIT Press, 2019) which explores the deep connections of open access and network neutrality debates with neoliberalism and draws lessons for activism in future such debates.
While serving as Faculty Associate, Dr. Newman will continue work on a book project examining the political economic and epistemic foundations of modern-day logistical and supply chain processes of which media and communications are increasingly a significant part. Such mechanisms feed into the struggle for primacy of competing notions of governance, including stochastic ones that directly challenge liberal democratic models, often turning their own mechanisms against themselves. In such an environment these dynamics become crucial to understand and theorize; policy surrounding artificial intelligence and privacy are but one expression of these dynamics. Dr. Newman earned his Ph.D. at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.
Previously, he served as Research and Campaign Director for the national nonprofit advocacy group Free Press. With Robert McChesney and Ben Scott, he co-edited The Future of Media: Resistance and Reform in the 21st Century (Seven Stories Press, 2005), named as one of Working Assets' Recommended Reads for July 2005. He worked as a Telecommunications Fellow for Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois in 2007. He spent several years as a freelance multimedia designer and as a production designer for a number of independent films; he was also active in noncommercial radio in Boston for nearly a decade.
