University Professor Awarded Ford Grant

Director of Georgetown University’s Communications, Culture and Technology Program and Research Professor Dr. Linda Garcia, Ph.D., received a Ford Foundation Grant to help further her study of communications policy earlier this month.

Dr. Garcia will use the $100,000 grant over a two-year period to study the evolution of communications policy interest groups and their advocacy positions. The study is focused on comparing a number of public interest groups in their “organizational fields,” on which their behavior or future success is contingent.

Dr. Garcia is very pleased about being a recipient of the prestigious grant. “I’m grateful for the funding, but more importantly that the Ford Foundation is willing to reach out to new areas of investigations in communications policy,” she said.

Dr. Garcia was officially informed of the grant after working for several months with Ms. Becky Lentz, the Project Officer of the Media and Technology Program of the Ford Foundation. The study will end in the production of a book entitled Communications

Policy: An Organizational Field Analysis of the Role of Public Interest Groups. The grant will also pay for the assistance from two graduate research students in the CCT program.

According to Dr. Garcia, the study of communications policy is necessary because we often think about policy issues and the organizations that represent them as singularly acting on their own, and we rate their respective statuses depending on what they study, what they do well and whether they are effective. In reality, however, all of these policy

issues and organizations are interrelated.

”In other words, we cannot know why one organization is doing something without understanding who funds it, how the funding relates to government and policy and how it relates to others competing for the same funding,” she said. “If we are going to have a healthy policy community, we have to understand what it takes to sustain policy related to organizations.”

Dr. Garcia is highly praised by her colleagues for receiving a Ford Foundation Grant. “Dr. Garcia is an exceptional teacher and leader in her field. She has done a remarkable job as Director of the Communications, Culture and Technology Program,” Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dr. David W. Lightfoot, Ph.D., said in a March 24 Georgetown press release.

“The Ford Foundation Grant will enable her to make a significant contribution to the study of communications policy,” Davina S. Sashkin, the communications manager of the Communication, Culture and Technology Program at Georgetown, said. “Ford Foundation grants are highly competitive and the process quite rigorous, thus it is a high honor for Dr. Garcia to have been awarded the grant. It is an even greater honor for the CCT Program to be able to participate in the project and a terrific opportunity for our students to gain practical experience in communications research.”

Before she became a professor at Georgetown, Dr. Garcia was the Project Director and Senior Associate at the Office of Technology Assessment, which is a part of the United States Congress. Her position there consisted of directing studies on electronic commerce, intellectual property rights, national and international telecommunications policy, standards development and telecommunication and economic development. She then joined the CCT in 1996, serving as Research Professor and Associate Director, and became the Director in 2001.

The Ford Foundation is a philanthropic organization that supports innovative people and institutions worldwide. According to its Web site, its primary goals are to “strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation

and advance human achievement.”