Becky Lentz
Becky Lentz is an Associate Professor of Communication in the Department of Art History/Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal. She specializes in media policy studies from a civil society perspective. Her research explores the types of expertise that public interest policy advocates need to acquire, mobilize, and teach others in order to build the capacity to effectively influence national and international decision-making concerning information and communication technologies (ICTs) and media infrastructures.
Her work is deeply influenced by her experiences before coming to McGill serving as the first program officer for media and technology policy at the Ford Foundation in New York City between 2001-2007. There she designed and directed a multi-million dollar domestic and international grantmaking initiative advancing freedom of expression and social justice through community organizing, legal advocacy, collaborative scholar/activist research, and philanthropic investment in the media policy field.
Her work has been featured in internationally recognized journals that include Telecommunications Policy, Global Media and Communication, the International Journal of Communication, the Canadian Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, The Information Society Journal, Communication, Culture & Critique, Info, and the Journal of Information Policy.
Professor Lentz has also contributed to several edited collections that include the Oxford Handbook of Civil Society; the Blackwell Handbook of Global Media and Communication Policy; the Sage Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media; Inequity in the Technopolis: Race, Class, Gender, and the Digital Divide in Austin; Communications Research in Action: Scholar-Activist Collaborations for a Democratic Public Sphere; and the forthcoming book, Strategies for Media Reform: International Perspectives.