Decoding Metacommunication Patterns From African American Single Mothers to Sons

With a significant number of African American single-parent families responsible for raising a generation of male children, the focus of this qualitative case study was on exploring the African American single mother-son dyad to identify metacommunicative signals delivered from mothers to sons. This study was grounded in a theoretical framework combining attachment theory and social learning theory. The research questions focused on identifying metacommunication messages passed from mothers to sons and how metacommunication patterns influence the youth\u27s social identity. Four single mothers with adolescent sons and 4 unrelated adult sons of single mothers participated in semistructured interviews. Data were collected and analyzed using content analysis and coding supported with NVivo software. Key findings revealed that the metacommunication was a dominant form of communication in the African-American family construct, and affected the parenting styles. From the mother\u27s retrospective reports, African-American mother\u27s adapted an authoritarian or helicopter parenting styles to control and protect their sons from racism, becoming victims of crime and violence, being arrested, or incarcerated. The key finding from the sons\u27 retrospective reports was that negative metacommunication from single mothers to sons was associated with insecure attachment, avoidance, and risky behaviors. The implications for social change are that positive metacommunication can strengthen the African American single mother-son dyad. This information may lead to intervention strategies for targeting negative metacommunication patterns from African American single mothers to sons and teaching new communication rules that foster a secure relationship

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThis dissertation is a qualitative case study of organizing for sustainability, which is an ambiguous term that has been part of public discussion of environmental issues since at least 1987. A growing number of organizations employ sustainability officers responsible for communicating with internal and external audiences. Since this sort of work is becoming more common, scholarship investigating the intersections of sustainability, organizing, and communication is needed. This study followed the development of an office of sustainability at a large U.S. public university from the fall of 2007 to the spring of 2010. The author engaged in longterm participant observation, conducted 20 in-depth individual interviews, and two group interviews with employees and partners of the office of sustainability. This study's research questions focus upon lay theories of communication, organizing, and persuasion. The author develops a uniquely interpretive approach to reconstructing and assessing lay theories of communication. Employing this analytic framework, the author addresses participants' lay theorizing of intraorganizational advocacy, voice, and communication ethics. Findings show that study participants navigate at least three tensions when cultivating a collective environmental voice on campus, and theorize communication in ways that discourage or disparage overt influence and the direct engagement of communication ethics in discussions about sustainability. The study demonstrates the value of inquiry into sustainability advocates' metacommunication in addition to their communication strategies and practices

Considering EcoJustice and place-based responses to market-oriented schooling

The politics of neoliberalism fester within education behind discourses of success, deficit, and normalcy. They intersect with discourses such as anthropocentrism, individualism, racism, ability, and others to organize society in a hierarchal manner and prioritize unfettered competition within an economic framework. The power of these discourses resides in their ability to communicate systemic ideology—masking the systemic oppression inherent to neoliberalism. These discourses can be traced to a mechanized worldview that understands matter, relationships, and knowledge through the metaphor of a machine. This study was designed to investigate how discursive meanings combine to create alternative discourses and to answer the research question: What kind of discourse is produced by a pedagogy that challenges competition as a common sense assumption, challenges mechanized ways of understanding relationships, and understands humans and the other-than-human world to be interrelated? One objective of this inquiry was to bridge EcoJustice and place-based education theory and practice. Another was to explore how these pedagogical approaches challenged neoliberal relationality. The last goal was to bring attention to the imbalance of educational aims that disproportionately focus on skills needed for economic prowess and skills needed to maintain ethical and sustainable relationships. Critical discourse analysis was the best methodological fit given the question and objectives. Data were generated via interviews. The socio-cognitive and three-dimensional approaches to analyzing discourse were used to understand the significance of discursive exchanges and how they communicate meaning. The findings revealed that participants used an ecocentric perspective of relational exchanges to guide their students through a systemic critique of injustice. They defined competition through a frame of mutuality and used affection to enact politically charged care agendas. They used place as a tool to teach lessons of affection and membership. Students were taught to find and appreciate the uniqueness of their place and how to frame differences as assets. Teachers used a nonjudgmental awareness to engage students in a way that decentered humans and flattened the hierarchy. They provided students with tools that allowed for immediate change. Lastly, they used post-inquiry instructional approaches to show students an alternative way to make meaning and assess unethical situations

Language Use in an Old Order Amish Community in Kansas

Old Order Amish are a religious group with three languages in its linguistic repertoire: Pennsylvania German (PG), American English (AE), and Amish High German (AHG). The present dissertation examines how this constellation influences language change, what communicative problems it causes, and how communicative problems are resolved. This is achieved by analyzing patterns of language change, socio-cultural factors of language change, language use in various situations, and strategies that are employed to solve communicative problems in a specific speech situation (the sermons). The methods employed are ethnographic (participant observation, interviews), especially ethnography of speaking, and linguistic (comparative analysis of translation tasks and interviews, discourse analysis) . The dissertation shows that the examined speech community undergoes a change in the occupational structure that increases contacts to AE, but maintains the traditional patterns of PG use. The linguistic analysis shows that PG in the community exhibits AE influence in few areas of the linguistic structure, but in all speech situations

Challenging common sense about nonsense : an integrational approach to schizophrenic language behaviour

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 159-168).Due to certain fundamental flaws, orthodox linguistics has not succeeded in producing a coherent account of 'schizophrenic language' - the host of symptoms that are alternatively characterised as evidence of formal thought disorder or labelled as disorganised speech, a disorder in itself. The most important of these flaws are its treatment of languages as fixed codes, which doubles as an explanation of how linguistic communication works, and its postulation of the mental structures that would be necessary if languages were indeed fixed codes, and communication a matter of encoding and decoding messages. In particular, orthodox linguistics has bolstered the now-dominant neo-Kraepelinian, biomedical account of schizophrenia, which treats utterances as symptoms that give clues to brain (dis)organisation and (dys) function. Integrational linguistics, which criticises the culturally based assumptions - collectively referred to as 'the language myth' - that are at the heart of the orthodox account of languages and language, provides an alternative. It sympathises with the growing trend in cognitive science and philosophy towards 'embodiment' and 'distributed cognition', which recognises that encultured entities like languages, minds, brains, bodies, and world are intrinsically defined by their co-evolution in the species, and co-emergence during an individual's development. Integrationists argue that by focusing in the first instance on second-order cultural constructs called 'languages', orthodox linguistics fails to give an account of the first-order experience of language users. This thesis approaches the topic of 'schizophrenic language' from a broadly integrationist perspective in order to demonstrate that because orthodox linguistics is so widely taken for granted in psychiatry, its biases inform current mainstream accounts of schizophrenic language, motivate the outright dismissal of interpersonal accounts, past and present, and provide a skewed picture of the phenomenon it purports to be describing, by ultimately constructing an individual-focused, deficit-based account of what is not, as opposed to what is. That is, by holding up orthodox linguistics' idealised version of communication and speakers (which has little applicability even to 'normal' language users), it uses deviation from the ideal as description and explanation, rather than recognising the strategies actually employed by schizophrenics in their attempts to make sense, even if these attempts fail. The alternative argued for here is to apply the tenets of integrationist linguistics to schizophrenic language behaviour, to give a fuller account of communication situations involving schizophrenics and normal interlocutors. As a result, this thesis calls for a reformulation of the idea that incomprehensibility stems from deviant speech, itself the product of an irrational brain. 'Sense', 'deviance' and 'irrationality' are a moment-to-moment metalinguistic appraisals made by language users, second-order cultural constructions that shape the speech community's response to certain individuals. Describing the speech of schizophrenics as 'deviant', 'irrational', or 'nonsensical' constrains their jointly-constructed capability of making sense using the resources (which may include other individual's minds) at their disposal. Integration linguistics thus brings into focus a moral and political dimension to such descriptions which is obscured by an orthodox linguistics-biased biomedical approach

A Family Enrichment Workshop to Enhance Communication Skills Among African-American Families at the Berean Seventh-day Adventist Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Problem Research has established that healthy communication skills contribute to marital and family satisfaction among African-Americans. African-American families, in particular, are in need of communication skills and enhancement resources that address their specific ethnic and cultural dynamics. The Berean Seventh-day Adventist Church is a predominately African-American church located in the Belfair community of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Currently the Seventh-day Adventist Church does not provide any researched family enrichment resources that address the specific dynamics of African-American Seventh-day Adventist families, which makes it necessary for research, resources, and programs to be developed that assist Seventh-day Adventist African-American families with healthy communication skills to produce greater family satisfaction. Method The African-American families of the Berean Seventh-day Adventist Church were selected for investigation of improvement of healthy communication skills. Research was conducted and a family communication enrichment seminar was tested as a means of providing the African-American families of the Berean Seventh-day Adventist Church with resources to improve family communication skills. The program was comprised of the following: 1. A review of the extant literature was conducted to identify the relevant components to be addressed in the program. 2. A six-week pre-seminar sermon series was presented that taught the biblical principles of healthy family communication. 3. A survey evaluating the effectiveness of the six-week pre-seminar sermon series was administered. 4. A baseline family communication assessment inventory was administered to establish a benchmark of participants’ current use of positive communication skills. 5. A one-day, three-part family communication seminar designed to teach healthy family communication techniques was presented. 6. A survey evaluating the effectiveness of the family communication enrichment seminar was administered. 7. An exit family communication assessment inventory was administered to collect data for comparison to the baseline. 8. The data was evaluated, conclusions were made, and recommendations were suggested. Results Survey results indicated that participants benefited from the six-week sermon series and also viewed the seminar as beneficial to their understanding of positive family communication. Analysis of the pre- and post-family communication seminar intervention indicated a slight increase of respondents reporting positive family communication between pre and post-seminar assessment inventories. Of the 39 results 20 showed an increase, with seven being statistically significant. Of the 39 results 19 showed a decrease, with six being statistically significant. Statistically significant improvements were made in the areas assessing communication frequency, communication avoidance, and the quality of family of communication. Conclusions Five recommendations emerged as a result of this project: a) Replicate research using a larger sample size (100 or more samples) and multiple interventions; b) In the future, allow a longer period of time between assessments to allow participants a greater opportunity to internalize the information presented during pre-sermon series and seminar; c) In the future, have trained surveyors administer inventories; d) In the future, design an inventory to assess family communication that is culturally sensitive to African-American families; e) In the future, include in each component of the program all family members (i.e., children, other adults) of the household, and have them complete pre and post-intervention assessments

Overpopulation or Over Population? A Burkean Analysis of Transformations and Continuities in the Rhetoric of “Human Population Growth” at the United Nations (1974-2004)

Despite the prominence of the issue across time, scholarly accounts of population rhetoric remain limited. Those analyses that do respond to this current of public argument focus overwhelmingly on actors such as Paul Ehrlich and R. Thomas Malthus, and on extreme instantiations of population rhetoric and policy, such as eugenics and China’s one-child policy. Missing in this body of scholarship is a sustained treatment of population rhetoric on a global stage, as it has occurred at United Nations conferences for over 30 years. This under-appreciated body of texts yields a global vision of population. Beyond the reductionist approaches to population that draw scorn from scholars, activists, and policymakers alike, the consensus documents produced at Bucharest (1974), Mexico City (1984), Cairo (1994), and the follow-ups to Cairo (1999 and 2004) take into consideration the complex web of factors that feed into population and that are fed by population. By employing a model of rhetorical criticism that focuses on a “close reading” of the final consensus documents produced by each conference, this study charts both the transformations of public argument across time while also paying special attention to the continuities in these texts. This project aims to benefit multiple scholarly communities, including environmental studies, international relations, public argument, and rhetorical theory and criticism, as well as to policymakers, NGOs, and activists focused on population issues. I consider whether it is meaningful to continue to talk about “population” as an issue separate from a web of interconnected factors, and whether we are in fact beyond discussions of overpopulation to the point where we have moved past and are thus over population. Alongside this topical question, this project opens the conversation as to whether UN conference documents, and related documents, constitute a unique rhetorical genre, and if so, what some characteristics of this genre might be