More than a year in as Annenberg dean, Sarah Banet-Weiser focuses on care and collaboration

It's one thing to talk about care, compassion, collaboration, and culture as a leader, but it's another to embody these values, to have a community feel their impact, to make them more than platitudes. This is something Sarah Banet-Weiserhas done throughout her career, from her scholarship on feminist media culture to founding the Center for Collaborative Communicationto her latest role.

These beliefs, she says, are rooted in her life experiences and she has drawn on them time and time again. Her parents moved their family, including seven children, from Indiana to California when she was 8 years old. A year later, her father survived a serious heart attack but was disabled for the rest of his life and could no longer work, leaving her mother-who had been a stay-at-home mom-to take charge. Her mom opened a day care facility and helped the family get by.

"From a comfortable middle-class family, we were suddenly thrown into a life of food stamps and welfare," Banet-Weiser recalls. She says witnessing and participating in what her mother prioritized in life has been a tremendous influence in her life, inside and outside academia.

In the fall of 2023, after being named deanof the Annenberg School for Communicationat the University of Pennsylvania, she held listening meetings with staff, faculty, and students to determine shared and group-level priorities. A few themes kept coming up.

After the University announcedthat it would fund gatherings within individual schools to discuss topics of interest over a meal, called the Dinners Across Differences series, Banet-Weiser worked these themes into the meals. The first two events, she says, were about how a university works and the role of media scholars in times of crisis, including crises of misinformation and disinformation. And the third was about prioritizing care.

"I think that compassion and care should always be part of an academic community, but I think those things come into bold relief when you're in times of crisis," Banet-Weiser says. "You need to be specific about them, and you need to be intentional and not just assume that care is going to happen and not just assume that everyone understands empathy in the same way."

The dean has carried this mindset into this school year, laying out a theme of care and joy in her fall welcome message. Banet-Weiser wants to intentionally communicate that this is at the crux of the Annenberg community-which includes 24 standing faculty, 16 lecturers, 71 graduate students, and 21 research centers- and for scholars to foreground it in their research.

"Many faculty and students here are doing work that has, as its goal, some kind of social justice, and care for others is built into that research," Banet-Weiser says.

"Dean Banet-Weiser is dedicated to the mission of Annenberg," says Interim Penn President J. Larry Jameson. "Sarah is empathetic, compassionate, and collegial, and her leadership is inspiring Annenberg faculty, staff, and students to bring their knowledge to bear on the great challenges of our time, from climate change to misinformation to health communication."

Meeting the moment

Banet-Weiser spent the first 20 years of her career at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, rising to director of the School of Communication and then vice dean of the School for Communication and Journalism. She developed a friendship and partnership with Willow Bay, then the director of the School of Journalism and now the dean of USC Annenberg.

"I quickly came to admire her intellectual impact and clarity, her firm and steady leadership, her empathy and compassion, her wicked sense of humor, and, most importantly, a true love for nurturing students," Bay says. "In many ways, she became my most trusted advisor as I transitioned from the industry to the academy, and, together, we created new and innovative ways to build bridges between the two."

Banet-Weiser left USC in 2018 to head the Department of Media and Communicationsat the London School of Economics and Political Science. She returned to USC in 2021, while holding a joint appointment at Penn's Annenberg as the Lauren Berlant Professor of Communication.

That fall, she established the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication, designed to bridge the two Annenberg schools. The center has facilitated student and faculty exchanges between the institutions, created writing mentorship opportunities, held numerous research talks and symposia, and produced podcasts on topics such as feminist networks.

Banet-Weiser is one of the foremost scholars of gender in the media and has written about feminism, misogyny, and racism for more than a decade. She developed the concept of popular feminism in her book "Empowered" and how it plays out in advertising and online and multimedia platforms. Two other books, "Authentic," on branding, consumer culture, and media, and "Kids Rule," about children and media, center the ways in which media representations, platforms, and ownership shape cultural norms.

She has also commented about the Harvey Weinstein trial and #MeToo, feminism within a younger and more online generation, social media influencers, and TV shows that foreground sexual violence, such as "Unbelievable," "The Morning Show," and "I May Destroy You."

A few months before becoming dean, Banet-Weiser published the book "Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt" with Kathryn Claire Higgins, a former postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Collaborative Communication and current lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. They argue that, while law is an important discipline for sexual violence cases, narratives and whether women are believed play out in media culture.

"Media is central. It creates the stories that we then understand and live our lives by, and some of those stories are really damaging and have been damaging for centuries," Banet-Weiser says. "We created those stories in the first place, so we can recreate them in ways that resist sexist and racist structures rather than support them."

She taught a Ph.D. seminar in the fall of 2024 on feminist theory and communication, and, while she doesn't have nearly as much time as she used to for her own scholarship, "I do try to grab bits of it," she says. Banet-Weiser is starting to think about a project related to how our contemporary fears, desires, and rage travel through networked digital media, where they are reshaped and redirected, often into radically different political trajectories. One example of her commitment to collaboration as a feminist method is a paper she co-wrote with Higginsand published in October in the Journal of Gender Studies: "Liars, Scammers, and Cheats: con(fident) women and post authentic femininities on television."

"I think that Sarah Banet-Weiser's work is particularly great for its ability to have incisive commentary on topics that matter to a lot of people and that a lot of people are conversant on," says second-year Annenberg doctoral student Sara Reinis, one of the dean's advisees and a recent co-author, "but then taking it to a deeper level and examining specifically feminist issues but also other issues of power." Reinis says she came to Penn specifically to work with Banet-Weiser, inspired by how she has shifted her research across topics.

Reinis says that Banet-Weiser has made her feel like she's "invested in you as an individual and the community of Annenberg as a whole" and that the dean is accessible and approachable despite her busy schedule. "I think that's a tall task as dean, to have all the administrative abilities and being invested personally for so many students," Reinis says.

Looking to the future

Barbie Zelizer, the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication at Annenberg and director of the Center for Media at Risk, has known Banet-Weiser for decades and describes her as someone who "represents, in many ways, an amalgam of the field of communication" and will "embrace different perspectives or different pathways to solve different problems.

"She's a first-rate, internationally recognized scholar who has led the field in thinking about gender," Zelizer says. "She's a consummate administrator. She really knows how to lead simultaneously from the head and from the heart. She's a very compassionate leader."

Zelizer says that, as Penn faced a difficult road last year, Banet-Weiser took Annenberg down that road with purpose and strength. Now the dean is looking ahead, with gratitude for what she has and excitement for what is to come at Annenberg.

As Banet-Weiser looks to share the Annenberg story, she has embarked on a new podcast seriescalled Annenberg Conversations, in which she speaks with scholars about new research in the field of communication. The first episode delved into election politics, and in February the second will investigate the labor of care.

An important element of Banet-Weiser's vision for Annenberg involves incorporating strengths of faculty, centers, and labs into research networks that enhance understanding of the School's work and foster collaboration. Vice Dean Emily Falkis leading a pilot launching this spring, broadly framing the research and learning at Annenberg in four categories: computational social science, cultural inquiry, health communication, and politics, policy, and institutions.

The school is also embarking on a renovation project that will result in more collaborative spaces, Banet-Weiser says. And for the first time in more than two decades, Annenberg is planning to reintroduce a master's degree in communication and media industries.

Banet-Weiser says that, in line with Penn's strategic framework, In Principle and Practice, a lot of work at Annenberg is about being anchored in Philadelphia. Most of the school's talks are open to the public, and graduate students partner with artistic organizations across the city in their multimodal scholarship.

Through the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, faculty will teach an Academically Based Community Service Coursein the spring that has doctoral students engaging West Philadelphia youth on climate communication and action. One of the professors, Andy Tan, won the Provost/Netter Center Faculty-Community Partnership Awardlast year.

"Part of what I have been talking about from the moment I was appointed dean, as my vision, is to tell the story of Annenberg more clearly, to tell the story of Annenberg more widely, to make sure that Annenberg doesn't just stay within these walls but engages with the community," Banet-Weiser says. "We are a school of communication and media scholars. We have to communicate about ourselves, and part of that is about engaging with different members of the community and different kinds of projects in the community."

Thinking about the school's faculty, she is left with one question: "How lucky am I?"

"I feel really, really lucky that I am part of this school and that I have the community that I do," she says. "I think that does sound kind of sentimental, but things like joy and grace and friendship are actually the way forward, and I think we do our best work in those circumstances, when we're not motivated by fear or by anger. I'm just trying to help create the conditions where that can continue."