Research

This essay spotlights some of the ways that the 2020 presidential campaign reified the sexism and racism baked into American politics. To demonstrate her suitability as Joe Biden’s running mate, vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris had to downplay her skill as a prosecutor with political intellect and present herself more as a doting and submissive partner picked out of a group of women vying for Biden’s attention. Such expressions of loyalty helped complete the rhetorical disciplining of Kamala Harris as a suitable vice-presidential pick.

Traces the longstanding relationship between technology and Black feminist thought

Black women are at the forefront of some of this century’s most important discussions about technology: trolling, online harassment, algorithmic bias, and influencer culture. But, Catherine Knight Steele argues that Black women’s relationship to technology began long before the advent of Twitter or Instagram. To truly “listen to Black women,” Steele points to the history of Black feminist technoculture in the United States and its ability to decenter white supremacy and patriarchy in a conversation about the future of technology. Using the virtual beauty shop as a metaphor, Digital Black Feminism walks readers through the technical skill, communicative expertise, and entrepreneurial acumen of Black women’s labor—born of survival strategies and economic necessity—both on and offline.

Positioning Black women at the center of our discourse about the past, present, and future of technology, Steele offers a through-line from the writing of early twentieth-century Black women to the bloggers and social media mavens of the twenty-first century. She makes connections among the letters, news articles, and essays of Black feminist writers of the past and a digital archive of blog posts, tweets, and Instagram stories of some of the most well-known Black feminist writers of our time. Linking narratives and existing literature about Black women’s technology use in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century, Digital Black Feminism traverses the bounds between historical and archival analysis and empirical internet studies, forcing a reconciliation between fields and methods that are not always in conversation. As the work of Black feminist writers now reaches its widest audience online, Steele offers both hopefulness and caution on the implications of Black feminism becoming a digital product.

Let’s reset to establish a more civil global society. We are poised as listening leaders across fields to help reimagine and recraft a more peaceful and positive global community. The world needs us to help our communities rediscover the beauty and value of listening and learning from each other.

Rubrics are a commonly used tool to evaluate student work in the introductory communication course. Although rubrics may appear objective, they are continually interpreted by both instructors and students, often reflecting traditional classroom power dynamics. In order to understand how rubrics constrain as well as expand opportunities for the enactment of critical communication pedagogy, we conducted an interpretive analysis of the presentational speaking rubrics used in the introductory communication course at 20 institutions in the United States. In doing so, we identified three levels of rubric context: high, low, and shared. These contexts inform important theoretical and pedagogical implications for the introductory course, as they highlight existing power dynamics, instructor grading practices, and student agency.

In Horror Framing and the General Election: Ghosts and Ghouls in Twenty-First-Century Presidential Campaign Advertisements, UM doctoral student Fielding Montgomery reveals a pattern of mostly increasing horror framing implemented across presidential elections from 2000 to 2020. By analyzing the two most common frameworks of horror within U.S. popular culture (classic and conflicted), he demonstrates how such frameworks are deployed by twenty-first-century U.S. presidential campaign advertisements. Televised advertisements are analyzed to illustrate a clearer picture of how horror frameworks have been utilized, the intensity of their usage, and how self-positive appeals to audience efficacy help bolster these rhetorical attempts at persuasion. Horror Framing and the General Election shows readers how the extensionally constitutive ripples of horrific campaign rhetoric are felt in contemporary political unrest and provides a potential path forward.

This study investigates how the emotional tone of food safety risk communication messages predicts message virality on social media. Through a professional Internet content tracking service, we gathered news articles written about the 2018 romaine lettuce recall published online between October 30 and November 29, 2018. We retrieved the number of times each article was shared on Twitter and Pinterest, and the number of engagements (shares, likes, and comments) for each article on Facebook and Reddit. We randomly selected 10% of the articles (n = 377) and characterized the emotional tone of each article using machine learning, including emotional characteristics such as discrete emotions, emotional valence, arousal, and dominance. Conveying negative valence, low arousal, and high dominance, as well as anger and sadness emotions were associated with greater virality of articles on social media. Implications of these findings for risk communication in the age of social media are discussed.

Pick-up artists (PUAs) apply strategies from evolutionary psychology to exploit women emotionally, sexually, and financially. In China, PUA issues have been garnering attention from journalists and news media. However, scholars have yet to explore how such issues have been portrayed in Chinese online news media, in particular the attribution of responsibility. The current study content-analyzed 115 Chinese online news articles related to PUA issues to explore whom the responsibility for causing and solving the issue is attributed, and investigated the influence of journalist gender, geographical location, and publication range on the attribution of responsibility. The results indicated that (a) the responsibility for both causing and solving the issue was attributed to perpetrators and the society frequently and to victims sporadically and (b) the attribution of responsibility differs across geographical locations or when the news websites are national as opposed to provincial. Directions for future studies were discussed.

Public interest relations (PIR) is an approach to public relations scholarship and practice that contributes to the social good by integrating the concept of public interest into organizational goals and values. The need for PIR was emphasized during the COVID-19 pandemic as publics looked to organizations for information about a variety of topics (e.g., symptoms, vaccines). AARP created a series of tele-town halls to communicate with its publics, who are considered to be members of a “vulnerable population” during the pandemic. In order to understand how AARP’s Coronavirus Tele-Town Halls reflected the practices of PIR, I completed a critical thematic analysis of 28 virtual sessions that were hosted in 2020–2021. The analysis, which was guided by the tenets of PIR, found that AARP’s communication (1) highlighted common life course milestones of its publics, (2) emphasized the quality of the information, and (3) provided avenues to engage with the organization and its experts. Based on these findings, I developed theoretical implications that reflect a critical perspective on PIR and suggest future research avenues that seek to build this ethical and socially meaningful approach to public relations.

The pandemic and economic catastrophes of 2020 and the forms of resistance that surged against racist systemic and physical violence indicate, we contend, that studying public address in the present moment requires attention to the mutual contingency of rhetoric and digitality. Relying on interdisciplinary literatures and a global perspective, we direct such attention along three vectors: platforms, commons, and methods. We indicate how theorizing rhetoric and digitality transforms critical and historical traditions. In expanding the purview of the public address tradition while retaining the tradition's hermeneutic potential, we emphasize the need to challenge disciplinary terms and the desirability of expanded analytical methods. We submit that by not attending sufficiently to the advent and diffusion of digital media technologies, public address scholarship misses opportunities to shape ongoing conversations about how rhetoric mediates public affairs; and that insofar as struggles for racial justice are bound up with, not just mediated by, digitality, the prospects of diversifying rhetoric's professoriate increase when research on this topic is central rather than peripheral.

Higher education has been commodified as neoliberal ideology is reflected in and perpetuated through social discourses, such as memorable messages. These discourses socialize young adults to college and shape their understanding about the purpose of higher education. Through in-depth interviews with 20 first-year college students, Ashby-King and Anderson found that the memorable messages students received from their family, peers, and high school teachers reinforce the dominant neoliberal, job-centered understanding of college’s purpose. In turn, they suggest critical communication pedagogy as a form of resistance instructors and institutions can use to promote a more expansive view of higher education and teaching/learning.