Storytelling: For Non-Profit Organizations

Storytelling can be traced to ancient times where writing wasn’t common and very few people knew how to. Yet oral storytelling was a universal language. Philosophy, knowledge, myth, superstition and religious beliefs were passed down through storytelling (Kent, 2015). In today’s world, storytelling is used as a framework for non-profit organizations to convey the organizations impact, engage the public, and call individuals to actions (Bublitz, 2016). It also helps propel the brand, identity, and reputation. Regarding organizations’ purpose, storytelling can illustrate the reason and meaning for their existence (Dixon, 2014, p. 6). It turns facts and numbers into an emotional and compelling message to the public. Storytelling can also serve as an emotional snapshot of how the organization has helped impacted people’s lives before, during, and after (Dixon, 2014)

Income Risk and Aggregate Demand over the Business Cycle

This dissertation consists of three essays on income risk and aggregate demand over the business cycle, each addressing an aspect of the Great Recession. The first chapter reframes the standard liquidity trap model to illustrate the costly feedback loop between idiosyncratic risk and aggregate demand. I first show that a liquidity trap can result from excess demand for precautionary savings in times of high uncertainty. Second, I show that the output and welfare costs of the ensuing recession depend crucially on how the drop in demand for output is translated into a reduction in demand for labor. Increased unemployment risk compounds the original rise in idiosyncratic productivity risk and reinforces precautionary motives, deepening the recession. Third, I show that increasing social insurance can raise output and welfare at the zero bound. I decompose these effects to distinguish the component unique to the liquidity trap environment and show that social insurance is most effective at the zero bound when it targets the type of idiosyncratic risk households face, which in turns depends on the labor market adjustment mechanism. The second paper offers a novel model of the connection between the consumer credit and home mortgage markets through an individual’s credit history. This paper introduces a novel justification for the home mortgage interest deduction. In an economy with both housing assets and consumer credit, the mortgage interest deduction is modeled as a subsidy for the accumulation of collateralizable assets by households who have maintained good credit. As such, the subsidy loosens participation constraints and facilitates risk-sharing. Empirical evidence and a calibration exercise reveal that the subsidy has a sizable impact on the availability of credit. The third paper assesses the role of policy uncertainty in the Great Recession. The Great Recession features substantial geographic variation in employment losses, a fact that is often presented as a challenge to uncertainty-based models of the downturn. In this paper we show that there is a substantial correlation between the distribution of employment losses and the increases in local measures of both economic and policy uncertainty. This relationship is robust across a wide range of measures.Economic

“Anyone can be a scientist”: Constructions of expertise and citizenship in citizen science literate activity

Citizen science, a set of practices that involves public, non-professional scientists in scientific research and policy, has since seen a steady rise since the mid-1990s (Woolley et al., 2016). The increase in citizen science projects in STEM mirrors the “public turn” in writing studies in that citizen science carries many of the same concerns regarding reciprocity and sustainability as service learning or community writing does in writing studies (Mathieu, 2005). By examining citizen science, I aim to build connections between STEM public outreach and community writing efforts while examining the possibilities and limitations of citizen science pedagogies. I argue that focusing on citizen science as an exemplar space allows writing studies researchers to reimagine notions of expertise and citizenship, especially as they relate to scientific becoming and literacy in public contexts. The central contribution of my research is a rich description of the embodied, relational, and affective nature of science communication that crosses supposed divides between university and community literate practices. In this dissertation, I trace the tools, texts, and spaces of citizen science with attention to the bodies excluded from those spaces. I analyze two focal projects: the Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Network (IBMN) and the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS). Employing a situated approach, I draw on survey responses, interviews with citizen science participants and coordinators, text analyses, observations of trainings, and a focus group with coordinators to identify constructions of expertise and citizenship in the literate activity of IBMN and CoCoRaHS. I show how citizen scientists’ affective articulations of expertise shift across modes of communication and illustrate how citizen scientists both rely on and reject traditional formulations of expertise, seeking alternative framings to name non-institutional knowledge-making. This dissertation presents a new heuristic of expertise that unravels expert/nonexpert divisions, seeing science communication as a collective, ongoing and boundary-crossing project in which we all are invested.Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2024-09-16 without embargo termsThe student, Megan Mericle, accepted the attached license on 2024-04-19 at 11:18.The student, Megan Mericle, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2024-04-19 at 11:50.This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2024-04-19 at 16:27.DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #20500 on 2024-09-16 at 00:35:2