Research

With contributions from leading academic experts and practitioners from diverse disciplinary backgrounds including communication, disaster, and health, this Handbook offers a valuable synthesis of current knowledge and future directions for the field. It is divided into four parts. Part One begins with an introduction to foundational theories and pedagogies for risk and crisis communication. Part Two elucidates knowledge and gaps in communicating about climate and weather, focusing on community and corporate positions and considering text and visual communication with examples from the US and Australia. Part Three provides insights on communicating ongoing and novel risks, crises, and disasters from US and European perspectives, which cover how to define new risks and translate theories and methodologies so that their study can support important ongoing research and practice. Part Four delves into communicating with diverse publics and audiences with authors examining community, first responder, and employee perspectives within developed and developing countries to enhance our understanding and inspire ongoing research that is contextual, nuanced, and impactful. Offering innovative insights into ongoing and new topics, this handbook explores how the field of risk, crisis, and disaster communications can benefit from theory, technology, and practice.

It will be of interest to students, researchers, and practitioners in the fields of disaster, emergency management, communication, geography, public policy, sociology, and other related interdisciplinary fields.

We conduct a thematic analysis of digital news articles (2016–2020) about religious celebrations of Holi or “Phagwa” in Trinidad and Tobago to explore media representations of the festival of colors and Trinidadian cultural identity. We adopt Stuart Hall’s understanding of cultural identity and diaspora, and draw on Davis’ cultural performance framework that connects observable communicative practices to cultural performances. Two themes frame our analysis, Phagwa as (1) poetic process of performing religious identity and (2) power-play in performing national identity, suggesting that Phagwa rituals and local media attest to color-play as a complex, communicative practice used to demand attention and affirm participants’ religious (Hindu) and national (Indo-Trinidadian) cultural identities. Our findings represent a critical exploration of one religious festival played in a diasporic spatial context, interrogating issues around culture, power, religious identity, and digital media depictions in the act of celebration.

We look back to explore the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on domestic violence amplification in India and the digital activisms that spotlighted this social and health injustice. This analysis focuses on two case studies – the #LockDownMeinLockUp [#LDMLU] campaign mobilized on Instagram, and articles drawn from the digital feminist publication, Feminism in India [FII]. We share our perspectives on how the #LDMLU campaign visually politicized the public nature of a silenced and normalized injustice against at-risk women during a pan-national health crisis. We turn to FII’s reporting on DV exacerbation during India’s pandemic that vocalized this issue from three critical perspectives: structural problems that contribute to gender injustices; financial violence; and mental, emotional, and physical health impacts on abused and at-risk women. In addition to this ‘look back,’ we look ahead to consider calls-to-action and opportunities, digital and/or on-ground, that remain imperative after the urgency of the viral lockdown. We are still at the threshold of activisms waiting, and needing, to happen. We conclude with questions for ourselves and our readers about what happens to advocacy when urgency ends. This growing body of feminist work demonstrates that advocacy will persist across physical and virtual landscapes. It is our responsibility and hope, as gender and communication scholars, to rally challenges against oppression based on gender or sex. Domestic violence against Indian women is continually overlooked. Our collective perspective intends to consolidate visibility toward such acts of abuse at the center of this scholarly piece.

The body positive movement—which initially set out to positively represent, humanize, and liberate fat, nonnormative, and multiply marginalized bodies—has been co-opted, commodified, and depoliticized. For the movement to have any chance of returning to its radical fat activist roots, it must shift to center intersectionality in both the forms of rhetorical labor engaged by body positive rhetors as well as the bodies on and through which body positive rhetoric gains visibility. Using popular hip-hop artist Lizzo as a timely and illustrative example, this essay suggests that intersectional visibility politics are central to the political viability and decolonial worldmaking potential of body positivity. I analyze the ways in which Lizzo’s celebrity persona engages two forms of rhetorical labor that recenter the body positive movement back onto multiply marginalized bodies like hers and envision the possibility of a fat-positive world: (1) assemblaging the big butt and the fat, Black body, and (2) resisting dominant gazing and representational practices through performances of feeling herself. In doing so, I theorize intersectional assemblaging and feeling herself as two rhetorical maneuvers of intersectional visibility that reclaim power, agency, and humanity outside of the terms offered by coloniality and the white heteropatriarchal gaze.

Organizations have been increasingly paying attention to their myriad economic, ethical, social, and environmental responsibilities, partly driven by consumer pressure. It is imperative for organizations to identify who these socially responsible consumers are so that they can respond appropriately to their demands. Adopting the theoretical lens of hypermodernity, this study sought to develop a measurement to identify socially responsible consumers by their personality traits and behavioral intentions along five dimensions of hypermodernity. The study combined a systematic review of journal articles within business ethics, consumer psychology, and communication studies to propose a measurement, which was subsequently tested and refined. This study first offers a set of theoretically grounded psychographic variables that give robust insights into socially responsible consumers with high corporate social responsibility expectations. Second, the article offers practitioners a toolkit to identify socially responsible consumers.

Covid and . . . How To Do Rhetoric in a Pandemic (Michigan State UP, 2023. Edited by Emily Winderman, Allison L. Rowland and Jennifer Malkowski) is among the first edited collections to consider how rhetoric shapes Covid’s disease trajectory. Arguing that the circulation of any virus must be understood in tandem with the public communication accompanying it, this collection converses with interdisciplinary stakeholders also committed to the project of social wellness during pandemic times. With inventive ways of thinking about structural inequities in health, these essays showcase the forces that pandemic rhetoric exerts across health conditions, politics, and histories of social injustice.

Contributions include:

"Introduction: An Agenda for Pandemic Rhetoric," Allison L. Rowland, Emily Winderman, and Jen Malkowski

Part One: Pre-existing and Chronic

"Covid and Racialized Myths: Pre-existing Conditions and the Invisible Traces of White Supremacy," Raquel M. Robvais

"Covid and Environmental Atmospheres: Pulmonary Publics and Our Shared Air," Sara DiCaglio

"Covid and Science Denialism: The Rhetorical Foundations of US Anti-Masking Discourse," Kurt Zemlicka

"Covid and Vaccine Hesitancy: Tracing the Tuskegee-Covid Straw Man Fallacy as a History Presently Unfolding," Veronica Joyner and Heidi Y. Lawrence

Part Two: Essential and Disposable

"Covid and Essential Workers: Medical Crises and the Rhetorical Strategies of Disposability," Marina Levina

"Covid and Being a Doctor: Physicians' Published Narratives as Crisis Archive," Molly Margaret Kessler, Michael Aylward, and Bernard Trappey

***"Covid and Fatphobia: How Rhetorics of Disposability Render Fat Bodies Unworthy of Care and Life," Hailey Nicole Otis***

"Covid and Intersex: In/Essential Medical Management," Celeste E. Orr

Part Three: Remedy and Resistance

"Covid and Shared Black Health: Rethinking Nonviolence in the Dual Pandemics," DiArron M.

"Covid and Masking: Race, Dress, and Addressivity," Angela Nurse and Diane Keeling

"Covid and Disability: Tactical Responses to Normative Vaccine Communication in Appalachia," Julie Gerdes, Priyanka Ganguly, and Luana Shafer

"Covid and Doubt: An Emergent Structure of Feeling," Jeffrey A. Bennett

As one of the most successful pieces of transnational popular culture, we rhetorically analyze the compelling critique of neoliberal capitalism in the 2020 anime film, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train. Alongside this criticism of neoliberal capitalism, we theorize relations of mujō (無常/impermanence) found in the film, foregrounding this Buddhist principle to advance ways of being that resist neoliberal capitalist impulses. We forward three tenets that emerge in our analysis of this film: (1) recognizing that all beings are embedded within shared entanglements; (2) holding all beings responsible to serve others; (3) transcending the bounds of death by passing the torch of omoi (想い/human feeling). We argue that Mugen Train’s protagonists, the Demon Slayers, embody mujō that demonstrates how those under capitalist subjugation can only be liberated by recognizing human community grounded in such a relational ethic. We thus situate relations of mujō as a critical rhetorical theory that releases us from the neoliberal capitalist pursuit of mugen (無限/limitless).

Social media platforms have heightened the demand for identity-based politics, in which the public expects politicians to display personal aspects of their lives toward strategic ends. Using a multimodal rhetorical approach, this study analyzes the tweets of Ghanaian Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia in his first year after the 2020 election and to understand how he constructs his public image through personalization. Results indicated that he displayed his religious beliefs, strong relationship with his wife, personalized visual graphics, and patriotic participatory acts. The study argues that Bawumia’s identity and Ghana’s cultural context manifest in his personalization on Twitter. The image he constructs and the broader implication of this present study for strategic communication are discussed.

Polio vaccine hesitancy remains high in Pakistan due to various socio-political, religious, and economic factors. To address this, the government of Pakistan and its international partners such as UNICEF have devised a multipronged communication strategy to counter resistance to polio vaccine in hard-to-reach areas of the country. In this strategy, mainstream news media has been identified as a key stakeholder, as they have the potential to reach a wide range of population and disseminate easy to understand messages including both visuals and text. However, less scholarly attention has been paid to how mainstream news media in Pakistan frame polio and polio vaccine in their visuals. This study aims to fill this gap. Using visual framing as a theoretical framework, we analyzed 115 images from three selected newspapers published from 2010 to 2022. Our results suggest that the newspapers depicted hard-to-reach areas in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province which were more affected by polio and highlighted the criminality and securitization of polio vaccine in the country. In addition, female polio healthcare workers, who are instrumental in eradicating the disease, have been given marginal coverage, reflecting the importance of gender sensitivity in the region. Overall, this study contributes to the fields of visual communication, health communication, and international communication, particularly related to the Global South.

The introduction of the internet brought about many transformations in the political, social, cultural, and educational fields worldwide. This phenomenon of digital transformation introduced a myriad of positive, negative, and paradoxical impacts. This critical essay tackles some of the significant transformations and paradoxes which the introduction of the internet invited in modern Muslim societies, with a special focus on two specific domains. First, the realm of religious authority or obtaining authoritative religious knowledge in the age of the internet. Second, the realm of shifting gendered Islamic identities in the age of cyberspace. In exploring these complex and hybrid phenomena, special attention is paid to the tensions between the opposing forces of tradition and modernity, diversity and cohesion, hegemony and resistance, and globalization and localization in cyberspace, and their numerous and far-reaching effects.