Backgrounder Wes Shumar

Backgrounder:

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Wes Shumar

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Professor and PhD, Wes Shumar executes a number of responsibilities in his role of Culture & Communication Department Head for Drexel University. A globally ranked university demands cutting edge programs and faculty with the vision to help create and implement them.

The newest trends in human understanding revolve around the concept of “quanta”, or the concept of change in discrete amounts, as opposed to a continuous (analog) way. The appellation “quantum” is often added to an existing field to denote this change in study, as with quantum physics, quantum mechanics, and recently quantum psychology. The concept of quanta necessitates the understanding of each bunker of knowledge as its own system, and that expanding on that system involves study at both the macrocosmic and microcosmic ends.

Professor Shumar’s studies have followed this innovative path for years now. He describes his research as focusing on “…higher education, ethnographic evaluation in education, virtual community, the semiotics of mass culture, and the self in relation to contemporary personal and political issues of identity and globalization.”

Starting at the microcosmic end of communication theory, he studies the self- the understanding of the world on a personal level- which then gives birth to attempts at communication with a larger world. He incorporates the rise of the virtual community, the non-corporeal society that has sprung to life with the creation of the internet, as well as the physical denotations of mass culture. He finishes with the study of the ethnographic (description of customs of cultures or individuals) evaluation of culture at the macrocosmic end of communication.

Interior to these studies he has helped guide the field of Communication through his work as an ethnographer at the Math Forum (since 1997) and as Co-PI on EnCoMPASS- a project funded by the National Science Foundation to build a virtual community to support the growth of math teachers and, as a result, the education of their students.

In between, but tertiary to his studies, Professor Shumar worked with Episcopal Community Services to evaluate and work with their afterschool programs, and with Concord Hospital to assist in designing a Computer Supported Collaborative Work model. Prior to this Shumar developed an ongoing relationship with Community Occupational Readiness Program and Placement at Drexel University which uses Drexel’s students to tutor individuals in the community who are preparing for their GED or work placement.

Doctor Shumar graduated from the University of Pennsylvannia with a BA in Anthropology in 1976, from New York University with a MA in Cinema Studies in 1979, and from Temple University in 1991 with a PhD in Cultural Anthropology. He has numerous publications, most recently in a collaboration entitled, “Conversations About Reflexivity”, edited by Margaret S. Archer in 2010. He became the head of Drexel University’s department of Culture & Communication in 2009. In his free time he brews and studies craft beer.