Research

Diversity has become a proxy term used to talk about racism and other forms of systemic oppression on college campuses and in the classroom. Although scholars have suggested connecting diversity to power, privilege, and systemic oppression, whiteness can be used to challenge these systemic conversations bringing into question the usefulness of this suggestion. Based on interviews with 15 college students, I argue that college students’ diversity discourse functioned to (re)produce whiteness and neoliberal diversity by promoting individualism and meritocracy. I also suggest that instructors’ abilities to intervene in the (re)production of harmful ideologies are limited because students wanted classroom diversity discourse to focus on their perspectives and opinions which could challenge instructors’ attempts to connect individual discourses to systemic analyses. In turn, I propose dialogic instruction and critical communication pedagogy as an intervention. As instructors engage in these practices they should work to shift students’ understandings of racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression from an individual level toward systemic analyses.

This article examines Kimberlé Crenshaw’s interview on Democracy Now! in 2015 and her 2016 TEDTalk, “The Urgency of Intersectionality,” to theorize Black women’s “activist rhetoric of blame.” Crenshaw enacts three distinctive features of Black feminist pedagogy in her activism for the #SayHerName Campaign. She challenges traditional “frames” of antiBlack police brutality, uses blaming vocabulary from a Black woman’s standpoint to create new frames, and names an audiences’ “revolutionary potential” in dismantling misogynoir in the justice system. An activist rhetoric of blame expands frames in dominant discourses so that the collective blame toward an institution can encompass intersectional oppression.

Similar to three earlier studies, thematic analysis of 2,155 articles, identified in academic and popular press publications extending from 2016 to 2020, provides support for the centrality of the communication discipline’s content and pedagogy. These results reinforce the importance of communication to promoting health communication; growing individually and in relation to others; enriching the educational enterprise; enhancing organizational processes; being a responsible community member locally, nationally, internationally, and globally; and addressing crises, safety, risk, security, and science communication. Subthemes are identified in each of these six thematic categories, and the results are compared with those of the three earlier iterations of this study and in light of major shifts in the sociopolitical and cultural environment in the U.S. and the globe since the last iteration.

Andrew Wolvin (Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland Department of Communication) , along with Annie Rappeport (Ph.D., M. Ed., University of Maryland Department of Communication), has published “Narrative Listening and the Quest for Peace,” in the January, 2023, issue of The Global Listener.  The article is a case study of the New Story Leadership project to bring delegates from Israel and Palestine to Washington each summer to listen to each other’s stories and to meet with members of Congress. In the same issue, Professor Wolvin is featured in an interview on the state of listening education and research in today’s world.

A few days before Phagwa 2019, a Hindu leader described her identity: ‘I am three parts - I am Trini, I am Indian, I am Hindu. I am equally patriotic. I have the same love and reverence for the land, but I am Indian…I am also Hindu, that's my identity.’ She explained that negotiating this trio of identities is a theme often appearing in pichakaarees, a local song form performed during Phagwa in Trinidad. Named after the instrument used to spray abeer [colored water], pichakaree songs were envisioned as a metaphor for ingesting from one’s locality and spraying it out to impress upon the audience’s minds with constructive messages. Based on interviews with pichakaree artists and organizers, as well as local intellectuals and scholars, I present preliminary analysis of pichakaaree’s value for community members, the negotiation of creating a space for the artform and recognition within national culture, and participants’ hopes and recommendations for its future.  

News media are the public’s primary source about risks such as climate change, but traditional journalistic approaches to climate change have failed to build support for collective social responses. Solutions journalism, an emerging practice focused on credible stories about responses to societal problems, may offer an alternate approach. From an online experiment with a convenience sample of U.S. undergraduates (N = 348), we found that solutions journalism stories were positively associated with perceived behavioral control, which mediated support for collective action for climate change adaptation. Additionally, attribution of responsibility to individuals and government, participant hope, and eco-anxiety were associated with support for collective action. Findings extend our understanding of how risk communication affects policy support for climate change adaptation and suggest that solutions journalism may allow journalists to communicate climate change’s danger without depressing support for social action to mitigate its effects.

Speech and debate have been central in shaping traditions of argumentation in the United States. While much of debate history has focused on individual nation-states, attention to twentieth century intercollegiate debate tours offers one way for argumentation scholars to consider the transgeographic flows of argument exchange. This essay makes the case for thinking about the history of debate across borders. In order to contribute to this special issue’s focus on argumentation in the Americas, I offer the example of the University of Puerto Rico’s 1928 debate tour of the eastern United States, in which student debaters were able to ‘speak back’ to U.S. imperialism through embodied performances that compelled audiences to consider different perspectives on education, language, citizenship, and sovereignty.

Public memory is the conceptual process through which understandings about a historic event are defined, informed, and reshaped. This concept is important for public relations practitioners as public memory provides substance for the communicative process providing the space to establish shared meanings for members of a given public. One example of the role of public relations practitioners in crafting public memory was the 100th anniversary celebration of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (TUS), termed #TUS100 in November 2021. In order to understand what and how memory was communicated through the #TUS100 event, we completed an interpretive thematic analysis of the materials created and distributed by the Arlington National Cemetery Office of Public Affairs related to the 100th year Tomb Commemoration and video clips from three popular national news outlets (ABC, CBS, NBC). In doing so we found that public memory is an evolving narrative that has the potential to create/reaffirm relationships—both of which have implications for public relations scholarship and practice.

Guided by the 5C (confidence, complacency, constraints, calculation, and collective responsibility) model of vaccination behavior, we examine the psychological antecedents of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance (i.e. attitudes and intentions toward COVID-19 vaccination) among Black Americans, a group disproportionately affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

Celebrity announcements of diagnoses or deaths often generate talk. In turn, talk can spur health-related behaviors. Yet, very few studies have examined interpersonal talk about cancer as an outcome of celebrity announcements about health. Furthermore, questions remain about the theoretical predictors of such interpersonal communication. The present study investigated individual and network-level factors associated with interpersonal talk about cancer among Black women following the death of Aretha Franklin. Findings from a cross-sectional survey (N = 239) indicated that more than 40% of women talked about cancer, and more than half expressed intentions to talk about cancer with their family and friends. Network-level factors (health mavenism, network heterogeneity) were significantly associated with actual and intended interpersonal cancer talk. Of the individual-level predictors, emotional reactions were significantly related to actual and intended interpersonal communication. Understanding theoretical predictors of interpersonal cancer talk could lead to better structurally centered capacity-building strategies to mobilize peer-to-peer sharing among network-engaged Black women.