School of Journalism and Communication Co-Directors Liam Young & Allan Thompson.
Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication made changes to both its governance structure and its leadership team effective July 1. Associate Professor Liam Cole Young has been appointed to a five-year term as Co-Director and Program Head, Communication and Media Studies, succeeding Prof. Benjamin Woo. Associate Professor Allan Thompson will continue to serve as Co-Director and Program Head, Journalism, for an additional three-year term following a two-year interim appointment. The changes were announced by Brenda O’Neill, Dean of the Faculty of Public and Global Affairs.
Woo’s two-year term as Associate Director and Program Head for Communication and Media Studies was marked by several highly successful initiatives. He carried forward important work from his previous role as the Faculty of Public and Global Affair’s Associate Dean, Equity and Inclusion, in advancing EDID initiatives within COMS. These included the creation of an Anti-Oppressive Frameworks requirement for B.CoMS students which launched last year, and the recruitment and appointment of M. Remi Yergeau, Canada Research Chair in Critical Disability Studies and Communication.
Prof. Benjamin Woo served as Associate Director and Program Head, Communication and Media Studies, from 2023-2025.
Curriculum development was another of Woo’s priorities. He supported the development of three new degree concentrations in B.CoMS (launching in 2026-27) in Government and Professional Communication, Media and Entertainment Industries, and Public Engagement and Civic Culture. These concentrations are designed to provide students with a new tool to tailor their degree experience towards a specific area of interest or career growth. Woo additionally helped develop new practice-based courses for B.CoMS such as COMS 2005 Introduction to Communication Practice and COMS 1003 Digital Skills for Media Studies. He worked with the COMS graduate committee to develop a new comprehensive exam process for the Ph.D. in Communication program. These curricular efforts culminated in Woo’s year-long leadership of the 2024-25 COMS cyclical program review.
Woo was instrumental in establishing SJC’s new governance framework, which involved the creation of the Co-Director roles that Young and Thompson have taken up. “Ben’s leadership provided a steady hand during a period of transition at Carleton, and I’m grateful for his considered and principled approach to the job,” said Young, “I have learned a lot from Ben over the years, and particularly appreciated his mentorship and advice in my time as Undergraduate Supervisor. I know that his commitment to COMS as a program and as a discipline was felt by everyone who worked with him during his term as Associate Director.”
Prof. Liam Young begins a five-year term as Co-Director and Program Head, Communication and Media Studies.
Liam Cole Young is an associate professor of communication and media studies who joined the School of Journalism and Communication in 2016. He completed his doctorate at Western University’s faculty of Information and Media Studies and taught there and at Trent University before coming to Carleton. He has also held visiting appointments at Bauhaus-University-Weimar in Germany, and Aarhus University in Denmark.
Young is a scholar of media history and theory and author of List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to BuzzFeed (AUP, 2017). He is presently working on two major projects. The first traces global histories of salt as an “elemental” medium of culture and civilization. The second situates the recent legalization and mainstreaming of sports gambling within longer histories of datafication, financialization, and speculation. The two projects, like all of Young’s scholarship, are linked by a commitment to understanding media not just as senders or receivers of information, but as basic infrastructures that organize time, space and experience.
Over the last decade, Young has taught broadly across the COMS program in areas such as sports media, sound studies, mobile media, digital media industries, and approaches to communication research. He served as Undergraduate Supervisor of B.CoMS in 2024-25, which prepares him well to make the transition into SJC leadership.
“Universities are special places with long histories and important public mandates. They are part of the fabric that stitches communities together, and their unique governance structure is perhaps the least appreciated aspect of how that happens. I have been lucky throughout my career to learn from colleagues committed to faculty self-governance, and I take on this new role in the same spirit.”
Like all sectors, Communication and Media are being rapidly transformed by technological and social change. Young sees mapping these changes and determining how the COMS program can continue to help students navigate them as key priorities moving forward. “‘The internet’ as we have understood it for the last two decades is over. A decreasing number of platforms control not only the apps we use but also the basic hardware and infrastructure on which they operate. Computation is now planetary in scale. Politics, culture, and economics move at different rhythms and take on different shapes. Artificial Intelligence is all the rage right now but it’s not at all clear what is truly transformational and what is hype. Our program has always been about helping students wrestle with the conceptual and practical implications of such changes, and I’m looking forward to seeing how faculty and students work together to explore such challenges in coming years.”
Prof. Allan Thompson will continue serving as Co-Director and Program Head, Journalism for an additional three year term.
Allan Thompson has been the head of Carleton University’s journalism program since 2020 and stepped into the Director role in 2023.
He joined Carleton in 2003 after 17 years as a reporter with the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest circulation daily newspaper. In his career with The Star, Thompson covered immigration policy, then worked for a decade as a political reporter on Parliament Hill, travelling frequently on reporting assignments around the world. At Carleton he has published an edited collection called The Media and the Rwanda Genocide, The Canadian Reporter: News Writing and Reporting with colleagues Catherine McKercher and Carman Cumming, and the edited collection Media and Mass Atrocity: The Rwanda Genocide and Beyond. He also established the Rwanda Initiative media development project that fostered independent media in post-genocide Rwanda.
Since his appointment as Journalism program head in 2020, Thompson’s primary focus has been implementing the journalism program’s equity, diversity and inclusion action plan and ramping up the journalism program’s research activity, public outreach and internships. A major milestone this past year has been the launch of Carleton’s Certificate in Journalism in Indigenous Communities, a new one-year journalism skills certificate to be delivered on the ground in Indigenous communities to break down barriers and give Indigenous learners a chance to explore a career in journalism without leaving home.
“I know it sounds cliché, but it continues to be an honour to lead Carleton’s journalism program at such a critical time for the profession,” Thompson said.
“But I want to stress that there is an important distinction between ‘the news industry’ as we now know it, and journalism — journalism as the backbone of an open, democratic society. We still can, and we must, work to save the latter, to save journalism, even if we can’t save every aspect of the news industry as we currently know it. That industry is going to change and be replaced by something else – and in the lifetime of our students. Our mission right now is to prepare them for that challenge.”
This leadership transition also marks a shift in the School’s governance structure. For many years, the School of Journalism and Communication has been led by a Director and an Associate Director, with the office of Director alternating between Journalism and Communication and Media Studies during each leadership term.
Moving forward, these positions will both hold the title of Co-Director and Program Head. This change has been made to better align with how the School is led day-to-day, as the Co-Directors function as equals and not in a hierarchy that may have been suggested by the previous titles. It also reflects the spirit of collegiality and collaboration with which the School of Journalism and Communication operates.
Monday, July 7, 2025 in Communication News, General, Journalism News, Media Production News, News
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