Together We Know A Lot: Consensus Decision Making in the Classroom

Student group work is common practice in many courses whether they are focused on writing theory or application. The purpose of this review is to introduce one strategy for teaching cooperative teamwork. It is easy to say to a group of students, “decide as a group…” It is less common, and I am certainly guilty of this, to provide clear directions on how to decide as a group. Consensus decision making (CDM, or sometimes known as CBDM, consensus-based decision making) is a common strategy for making decisions as a group in collective and community organizing. Used in the classroom, CDM can be a useful strategy that enables students to engage in meaningful discourse with one another. Because CDM emphasizes listening, compromise, and cooperation, it foregrounds dialogue rather than competition or adversarial debate. Ultimately, CDM helps students practice cooperation and open sharing of ideas, important skills in an age of increasing polarity. In the sections below, I first provide a short overview of CDM. Second, I discuss CDM within the context of classroom instruction and why CDM is useful in this particular context. Finally, I share some applications for teaching CDM

Queering Consent: Design and Sexual Consent Messaging

For decades, sexual violence prevention and sexual consent have been a recurrent topic on college campuses and in popular media, most recently because of the success of the #MeToo movement. As a result, institutions are deeply invested in communicating consent information. This article problematizes those institutional attempts to teach consent by comparing them to an alternative grounded in queer politics. This alternative information may provide a useful path to redesigning consent information by destabilizing categories of gender, sexuality, and even consent itself

Trans∗Vulnerability And Digital Research Ethics: A Qubit Ethical Analysis Of Transparency Activism

Trans communities across the United States are under assault. Researchers seeking to work with trans people and other multiply marginalized and underrepresented communities must attend to ethical research practices within the communities in which they participate. Digital research ethics is particularly murky with issues of embodiment, vulnerability, and unclear IRB guidance. Comparing two transparency activist organizations-Wikileaks and DDoSecrets-we introduce qubit ethics, a trans material, trans-corporeal ethics of care as praxis within vulnerable online communities. We then demonstrate how this unique approach to research design allows for the complex entanglements that is trans life, particularly digital life. Finally, we present clear take-Aways for qubit-ethics informed social justice research

Growing Pains: The Transformative Journey from a Nascent to a Formal Not-For-Profit Venture

This article examines how a social venture transitions from nascent to formal status and argues that the transformation of the organization set in motion by establishing formal boundaries is a deeply profound one. Drawing from the nonprofit and social entrepreneurship literature on what prompts and energizes individuals to initiate new not-for-profit ventures, and linking it to a notion of revolutionary crisis as organizations emerge and develop, we seek to illuminate and explore the tension, and its consequences, between nonprofit entrepreneurs and the organization they create as the new venture transitions from nascent to formal. We do this by presenting the results from an in-depth case study examining the gestation and boundary-forming phases of Robert’s Place Cooperative, a plucky start-up cooperative in a midsize Midwestern city

Workplace Democracy and the Problem of Equality

Purpose: Professional communicators are becoming more invested in unique configurations of power in organizations, including non-hierarchical and democratic workplaces. While organizations dedicated to democratic processes may enact power differently than conventional organizations, they may fall short of practicing equality. This article explains the differences in non-hierarchical workplaces, considers businesses where democracy is a goal, and argues for considering equality as a habitual practice, particularly when writing regulatory documents. Method: We conduct a review of the literature on non-hierarchical workplaces and organizational democracy, applying Jacques Rancière’s concept of equality to two examples (one using primary data collection and one using secondary data) of two cooperatives where organizational democracy is integral to the design of the business. Results: The literature review exposes an interest in mêtis (cunning, craftiness, flexibility) as vital to practitioner success in non-hierarchical workplaces; however, this article demonstrates that mêtis does not prevent inequality, even in organizations expressly committed to workplace democracy. Conclusion: Professional communicators need to consider equality not solely as a structural resource (as in rules, laws, policies) but as a habitual practice to cultivate alongside other characteristics and frameworks important to a professional communicator’s toolkit

Open Access Textbooks in a Professional Communication Classroom: A Pilot Study

In this paper, we share our findings from a curricular innovation project: a small pilot study replacing a conventional professional communication textbook with an open access book. Results showed that students received the change favorably and a final grade comparison showed no variation between similar courses that used conventional books and those that used open access books. While far from definitive, this study demonstrates the promise of open access books and open educational resources (OER), and that further study is needed in this area

Working at the Intersections: Critical Race Scholarship and Pedagogy Today

Recent conversations in Utah and nationwide highlight the debate and division surrounding Critical Race Theory (CRT) in education. The purpose of this event is to celebrate the ways CRT informs and deepens our teaching, research, and community engagement in higher education. Panelists will explore how they use CRT in the classroom and in their research, and discuss how doing so advances USU’s mission of “cultivating diversity of thought and culture and “serving the public through learning, discovery, and engagement.” Join us for an engaging—and celebratory—discussion that will reenergize our shared purpose in this work and build connections across our university.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/inter_inclusion/1006/thumbnail.jp

Communities Activated: Stories from Behind the Scenes of Progress

In 2020, USU received the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement, recognizing USU has great work to do in our communities; as a land grant institution we have the responsibility to the communities in which we are located to honor the mission statement of ‘serving the public through learning, discovery, and engagement and cultivating diversity of thought and culture.’ This panel will center the voices of community leaders and change-makers dedicated to advancing progress toward equity. As we learn from panelists about their community initiatives and advocacy, participants will be invited to reflect on ways they can engage in their communities to ignite change.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/inter_inclusion/1007/thumbnail.jp

Research and Publishing during COVID-19

This discussion will explore the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on scholarly research and publishing. Travel restrictions, retracted funding, delayed or halted projects, and an increase in caretaker and other personal responsibilities at home compound to create unprecedented challenges for producing and publishing research. Early indicators show women, those with significant unpaid care responsibilities, and members of minoritized groups have been disproportionately impacted. For graduate students and early career faculty who depend on research and publication for promotion and tenure, the stakes are especially high. Join our panelists for a conversation about the how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting the research landscape. Watch the video to see the discussion. Click on the download button for a list of readings and resources.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/inter_inclusion/1001/thumbnail.jp

Comprehensive and user-analytics-friendly cancer patient database for physicians and researchers

Nuanced cancer patient care is needed, as the development and clinical course of cancer is multifactorial with influences from the general health status of the patient, germline and neoplastic mutations, co-morbidities, and environment. To effectively tailor an individualized treatment to each patient, such multifactorial data must be presented to providers in an easy-to-access and easy-to-analyze fashion. To address the need, a relational database has been developed integrating status of cancer-critical gene mutations, serum galectin profiles, serum and tumor glycomic profiles, with clinical, demographic, and lifestyle data points of individual cancer patients. The database, as a backend, provides physicians and researchers with a single, easily accessible repository of cancer profiling data to aid-in and enhance individualized treatment. Our interactive database allows care providers to amalgamate cohorts from these groups to find correlations between different data types with the possibility of finding "molecular signatures" based upon a combination of genetic mutations, galectin serum levels, glycan compositions, and patient clinical data and lifestyle choices. Our project provides a framework for an integrated, interactive, and growing database to analyze molecular and clinical patterns across cancer stages and subtypes and provides opportunities for increased diagnostic and prognostic power.Comment: 7 pages, 12 figures, peer reviewed and accepted in "International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI 22)