Lewis Friedland

Distinguished Achievement Professor

Lewis Friedland is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and affiliated with the Departments of Sociology and Educational Psychology.

He directs the Center for Communication and Democracy.

His work centers on the changing structure of civil society and the public sphere, and networked communication ecologies. He is currently focusing on the Wisconsin project, developing the “laboratory of oligarchy” framework based on lectures in 2016. Friedland is co-author with Carmen Sirianni of Civic Innovation in America (California 2001) and co- edited The Communication Crisis in America (Palgrave 2016) with Mark Lloyd.

Recent work includes “Networks in Place” (American Behavioral Scientist 2016) and “Habermas’s Account of Truth in Political Communication” with Tom Hove (in Truth in the Public Sphere 2016) in addition to publications with others from the Wisconsin project.