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Research

Faculty members and graduate students in the Department pursue and produce research that spans a wide range of the Communication discipline. 

Research within the department is generally focused in three broad curriculum areas:

  • Communication Science & Social Cognition,
  • Public Relations & Strategic Communication, and
  • Rhetoric & Political Culture

The Department of Communication is also home to the Mark and Heather Rosenker Center for Political Communication & Civic Leadership and the Center for Health and Risk Communication

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Facing Adversity Together: Toward a Genre of Organization- Stakeholder Resilience Discourse

A genre analysis of the messages created by Big 10 Universities to welcome stakeholders to the 2020–2021 academic year.

Communication

Author/Lead: Lindsey Anderson
Non-ARHU Contributor(s):

Ashley Jones-Bodie

Dates:
COMM_Cover_MCQ

Organizations, such as universities, face a variety of adversities, challenges, or disruptions that call for resilience to be enacted. Resilience is an important communicative process that relies on organizations and their stakeholders to collaboratively make sense of and respond to a given adversity, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to identify the shared characteristics that organizations use in their communication surrounding adversity, we completed a genre analysis of the messages created by Big 10 Universities to welcome stakeholders to the 2020–2021 academic year. Through our analysis we uncovered commonalities that make organization-stakeholder resilience discourse distinct—(1) defining a shared relationship, (2) detailing steps to regain a sense of normalcy, and (3) describing the outcome of enacting resilience. Based on these findings, we propose a genre of organization-stakeholder resilience by highlighting the role of communication in cultivating resilience through the emphasis on discursive relationships that exist between organizations and stakeholders.

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A Scoping Review of Emerging COVID-19 Health Communication Research in Communication and Media Journals

This article reports a scoping review of emerging research on COVID-19 health communication.

Communication

Author/Lead: Tong Lin
Contributor(s): Xiaoli Nan
Dates:
COMM_Cover_HealthComm

This article reports a scoping review of emerging research on COVID-19 health communication. We reviewed and analyzed 206 articles published in 40 peer-reviewed communication journals between January 2020 to April 2021. Our review identified key study characteristics and overall themes and trends in this rapidly expanding field of research. Our review of health communication scholarship during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that health communication scholars have risen to the challenges and interrogated important issues in COVID-19 communication at the individual, group, organizational, and societal levels. We identified important gaps that warrant future research attention including experimental research that seeks to test the causal effects of communication, studies that evaluate communication interventions in under-served populations, research on mental health challenges imposed by the pandemic, and investigations on the promise of emerging communication technologies for supporting pandemic mitigation efforts.

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Political Communication

Chapter examines the contemporary state of political communication.

Communication

Author/Lead: Trevor Parry-Giles
Dates:
Publisher: Routledge
COMM_Cover_TPGCh

Book abstract: 

This book provides an inside look at the discipline of Communication. In this collection of chapters, top scholars from a wide range of subfields discuss how they have experienced and how they study the crucial issues of our time.

The 2020s opened with a series of events with massive implications for the ways we communicate, from the COVID-19 pandemic, a summer of protests for social justice, and climate change-related natural disasters, to one of the most contentious presidential elections in modern U.S. history. The chapters in this book provide snapshots of many of these issues as seen through the eyes of specialists in the major subfields of Communication, including interpersonal, organizational, strategic, environmental, religious, social justice, risk, sport, health, family, instructional, and political communication. Written in an informal style that blends personal narrative with accessible explanation of basic concepts, the book is ideal for introducing students to the range and practical applications of Communication discipline.

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Revisiting Digital Islamic Feminism: Multiple Resistances, Identities, and Online Communities

Chapter explores digital Islamic feminism.

Communication

Author/Lead: Sahar Mohamed Khamis
Dates:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
COMM_Cover_KhamisBkCh

Book abstract: Through an array of detailed case studies, this book explores the vibrant digital expressions of diverse groups of Muslim cybernauts: religious clerics and Sufis, feminists and fashionistas, artists and activists, hajj pilgrims and social media influencers. These stories span a vast cultural and geographic landscape-from Indonesia, Iran, and the Arab Middle East to North America.

These granular case studies contextualize cyber Islam within broader social trends: racism and Islamophobia, gender dynamics, celebrity culture, identity politics, and the shifting terrain of contemporary religious piety and practice.

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The Rhetorical Style of Predatory White Masculinity in Judge Brett Kavanaugh's 2018 Testimony Before the Senate Judiciary Committee

Judge Brett Kavanaugh's rhetorical style produced a shift in temperament, which augmented rage and grievance as the ideal temperament for men in power.

Communication

Author/Lead: Skye de Saint Felix
Non-ARHU Contributor(s):

Lisa M. Corrigan

Dates:
COMM_Cover_WSIC

When President Donald Trump nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court in July 2018, many Democrats initially opposed him. He became a much more controversial nominee when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford brought forward accusations that he sexually assaulted her in 1982. In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh’s rhetorical style of predatory white masculinity was supported and encouraged by a chorus of Republican senators. Kavanaugh’s articulation of predatory white masculinity made white men victims, used women as pawns in white men’s innocence narrative, and enacted a partisan agenda to justify rage and nostalgia for a time when white male privilege was less scrutinized. But with the Kavanaugh confirmation, predatory white masculinity shifted norms and conventions about judicial temperament. His rhetorical style produced a shift in temperament, which augmented rage and grievance as the ideal temperament for men in power, especially when echoed by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and then-President Trump.

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Egyptian Women Journalists’ Feminist Voices in a Shifting Digitalized Journalistic Field

A qualitative feminist study analyzes Egyptian women journalists’ articulations of their shifting roles, struggles, and resistances.

Communication

Author/Lead: Sahar Mohamed Khamis
Non-ARHU Contributor(s):

Rasha El-Ibiary

Dates:
COMM_Cover_DigiJour

This qualitative feminist study analyzes Egyptian women journalists’ articulations of their shifting roles, struggles, and resistances to the political, legal, socio-economic, and professional challenges in a shifting, hybrid, and digitalized journalistic field. Through analyzing 16 interviews with women journalists representing different media affiliations, experiences, and demographics, this study explores their varied perceptions of the shifts in journalistic professionalism and press freedom in Egypt, their equally shifting professional roles and struggles, and their varied resistance mechanisms. On the one hand, this study unpacks the multiple challenges facing them, such as restricted journalistic autonomy, limited access to information and technology, sexual harassment, lack of job security, and other forms of professional discrimination, in a male-dominated profession and a patriarchal culture. On the other hand, it investigates the parallel resistance mechanisms they deploy to overcome these challenges. We argue that the amalgamation of these cyclical, push-and-pull dynamics gave birth to a new “differentiated media landscape” (Schroeder 2018), representing a third space between mainstream media and citizen journalism, the online and the offline, and the old and the new, in a rapidly evolving journalistic field.

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Exploring Introductory Communication Course Administrators' Relationship Management During COVID-19

This research project used semi-structured, in-depth interviews to explore how they engaged in relationship management with their instructors and how their approach to relationship management informed their transition to remote learning due to COVID-19.

Communication

Author/Lead: Ashley Aragón
Contributor(s): Drew Ashby-King
Dates:

The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly changed the context of higher education during the Spring 2020 semester. As the virus began to spread across the United States, colleges and universities canceled in-person classes and activities, closed campus, and moved all operations online. Within the communication discipline, introductory communication course (ICC) administrators and instructors were not only dealing with these challenges, but they were also navigating the transition of large multi-section, often standardized, courses online at large institutions. This research project used semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 18 ICC administrators from institutions located in 14 states across the Midwest, mid-Atlantic, Southeastern, and West Coast regions of the U.S. to explore how they engaged in relationship management with their instructors and how their approach to relationship management informed their transition to remote learning due to COVID-19. The analysis results in four emerging themes: (1) rhetorical approaches to relationship management, (2) relational approaches to relationship management, (3) relationship management → positive outcomes, and (4) relationship management as central to navigating COVID-19. Based on these findings we suggest a rhetorical/relational goals approach to course administration and offer practical implications ICC administrators can implement to engage in successful relationship management during times of crisis.

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Listening Leadership: An Academic Perspective

Article examines the importance of listening for university administrators.

Communication

Author/Lead: Andrew D. Wolvin
Non-ARHU Contributor(s):

Annie Rappeport

Dates:
COMM_Cover_JACA

As a detailed case study, “Listening Leadership: An Academic Perspective” explores the use of listening-centered leadership strategies by University of Maryland President Darryl Pines and his leadership team to develop the UMCP strategic plan for moving forward in a time of continued challenges. 

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Characterizing discourses about COVID-19 vaccines on Twitter: a topic modeling and sentiment analysis approach

This study identifies seven themes of COVID-19 vaccine-related discourses.

Communication

Author/Lead: Yuan Wang
Non-ARHU Contributor(s):

Yonghao Chen

Dates:
COMM_Cover_JCHC

Evidence-based health communication is crucial for facilitating vaccine-related knowledge and addressing vaccine hesitancy. To that end, it is important to understand the discourses about COVID-19 vaccination and attend to the publics’ emotions underlying those discourses. We collect tweets related to COVID-19 vaccines from March 2020 to March 2021. In total, 304,292 tweets from 134,015 users are collected. We conduct a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling analysis and a sentiment analysis to analyze the discourse themes and sentiments. This study identifies seven themes of COVID-19 vaccine-related discourses. Vaccine advocacy (24.82%) is the most widely discussed topic about COVID-19 vaccines, followed by vaccine hesitancy (22.29%), vaccine rollout (12.99%), vaccine facts (12.61%), recognition for healthcare workers (12.47%), vaccine side effects (10.07%), and vaccine policies (4.75%). Trust is the most salient emotion associated with COVID-19 vaccine discourses, followed by anticipation, fear, joy, sadness, anger, surprise, and disgust. Among the seven topics, vaccine advocacy tweets are most likely to receive likes and comments, and vaccine fact tweets are most likely to receive retweets. When talking about vaccines, publics’ emotions are dominated by trust and anticipation, yet mixed with fear and sadness. Although tweets about vaccine hesitancy are prevalent on Twitter, those messages receive fewer likes and comments than vaccine advocacy messages. Over time, tweets about vaccine advocacy and vaccine facts become more dominant whereas tweets about vaccine hesitancy become less dominant among COVID-19 vaccine discourses, suggesting that publics become more confident about COVID-19 vaccines as they obtain more information.

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“I lose” “I gain” vs. “They lose” “They gain”: The Influence of Message Framing on Donation Intentions in Disaster Fundraising

Study explores how message framing in charitable appeals influences individuals’ donation intentions.

Communication

Author/Lead: Yuan Wang
Contributor(s): Jiyoun Kim, Lingyan Ma
Non-ARHU Contributor(s):

Allison Chatham

Dates:
COMM_Cover_JICRCR

Grounded in the 2018 California Camp Fire context, this study explores how message framing in charitable appeals influences individuals’ donation intentions. A 2 (first person imagery perspective vs. third-person imagery perspective) × 2 (gain frame vs. loss frame) between-subject online experiment was conducted via Amazon’s MTurk. Results showed that gain/loss framing and imagery perspectives interactively influenced participants’ donation intentions. Specifically, when a message is loss framed, a first-person imagery perspective (“I lose”) message is more effective than a third-person imagery perspective (“they lose”) message in enhancing participants’ perceived issue relevance, induced empathy, and donation intention. In addition, when the message is framed with a third-person imagery perspective, a gain-framed (“they gain”) message is more persuasive than a loss-framed (“they lose”) message.

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