University of Maryland Communication Home

Morris and VanHaitsma "assemble for this special issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs— in the pages of one of the most revered journals in rhetoric and public address— a cast of queer scholars and scholarship from across generations to reflect on and illustrate diverse perspectives concerning where queering public address has been since 2007 (and its longer history), what its current state entails and does not but should include, and where it might— should— venture into the future. Much has changed since the queer turn in the field began, with exhilarating and vexing challenges to whiteness, coloniality, transantagonism, ableism, and more in emergent scholarship. Research is also becoming much less US- centric than it was when Queering Public Address was published nearly two decades ago. What the very key term “queer/ing” meant variously then has transformed significantly over time. We have thus asked the contributors to time travel bidirectionally to account for and embody queer/ing rhetoric and public address for the readership, for the generation to come, of Rhetoric & Public Affairs and the field writ large."

Social media play crucial dialogic and strategic roles during paracrisis. Responding to a prior call to extend agenda‐setting theory to study paracrises, this manuscript builds on the literature by moving beyond the dominant focus on for‐profit organisations in public relations and crisis studies into the political sphere. Adopting unsupervised machine learning and qualitative methods, this study used a comprehensive dataset of 2451 user‐generated comments on X during the 2023 U.S. House of Representatives Speaker election to contribute to the broader discourses on paracrises. Findings from topic modelling revealed that the agenda narrative focused on House proceedings and conflicts, the GOP's internal struggle, a leadership crisis and Democratic alternatives, as well as shared political interests and ideologies. In addition, a combination of sentiment analysis and sentence mapping highlighted positive user comments focused on the theatricalisation of serious politics and on appreciation for Democratic comportment. Conversely, negative comments emphasised attacks on figures/party, criticism of legislative dysfunction, and mismanagement of resources. This study first advances a definition for political paracrisis and highlights the profound contribution of these findings to the praxis of crisis studies.

The transformative force of AI is largely redefining how public relations professionals approach their work, understand their responsibilities, and make sense of the meaning and value associated with being a PR practitioner. While research in other disciplines have increasingly recognized the implications of AI toward professional identities, this topic remains underexplored in the public relations field. Through a quantitative survey (N = 285), we assessed how PR practitioners experience professional identity threats across five dimensions: expertise, status position, autonomy, professional influence, and job responsibility. Our findings highlight that these perceived threats are associated with a combination of factors, including AI use patterns, attitudes and assessment of AI, and influences from leaders and peers. Overall, this study contributes to ongoing conversations about the impact of AI toward the future of public relations through a novel perspective exploring PR professional identities. It also offers practical insights for leaders and organizations on strategies to support PR practitioners in successfully navigating the AI-driven public relations landscape.