New Curricular Categories for the Future: University of North Dakota School of Communication

This article provides information on new curricular categories of the University of North Dakota School of Communication, as of September 1995. The school historically has had a highly visible leadership role in the state of North Dakota, particularly with newspapers and broadcast stations in the state. Rather than limiting the possibility for change, however, its visibility joined other factors in making conditions for change favorable. The new curriculum streamlines the five into one, communication. This new curriculum is both mission driven and assessment driven. The new mission statement and goals for student learning set out the intellectual integration of communication that the curriculum of the university reflects

What Is Theory? Puzzles and Maps as Metaphors in Communication Theory

Many handbooks, books, and articles in communication studies offer definitions of theory, as well as approaches to what are the features of theory or what makes a good theory and to what are the functions of theory or what makes a theory useful. In this essay, we configure a taxonomy of definitions of and approaches to theory through a cross-disciplinary perspective, by reflecting on the different views on theory in the discipline of communication in the broader context of views on theory at the intersection of the physical sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We argue that a preeminent tendency, theory as puzzle-solving or map-reading, with its varieties science and investigation, is predominant in communication studies, based on a subject-object schism and on the preexistence of the object to the subject. We also argue that a counteracting tendency, theory as puzzle-making or map-making, with its varieties interpretation and inquiry, has been posited as an alternative in communication studies, based on a subject-object communion and on the creation of objects by subjects

Women's Emotions Towards the Mobile Phone

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether women's emotions associate differently with the mobile phone depending on the type of family in which they live. James A. Russell's circumplex model of affect which explores four main emotional dimensions, excitement, distress, depression and contentment, was applied. The article is based on the female sub-sample (N = 3,704) of nationally representative survey data collected from Italy, France, the UK, Germany and Spain (N = 7,255) in 2009. The results show that it is women living in blended families who seem to associate more distress and less feelings of contentment with the mobile phone than women living in other types of family.peerReviewe

What Is Happening Here? Re-imagining Feminist Communication and Media Work amid a Global Pandemic

This special chapter offers a conversation between the first ten Teresa Award Scholars of the Feminist Scholarship Division (FSD) of the International Communication Association (ICA) on the meaning of these extraordinary pandemic times on media and communication processes from a feminist scholarship perspective. It evolved out of a panel discussion during the annual conference of the International Communication Association in May 2020, which was held virtually due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. In January 2021, all contributors revisited the question, adding further thoughts from the vantage point of having experienced and observed the pandemic ebbing and flowing across the globe