Book Discussion

Book discussion of Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi. Faculty panelists include Sandra Gandy, JoAnne Smith, and Jason Zingsheim with Provost Terry Allison as moderator

COMS 810 Communication Theory

Course syllabus for COMS 810 Communication Theory Course description: Examines the concept of theory, investigates major theories of communication, and takes a critical approach to the evaluation of communication theories

COMS 540 Intercultural Communication

Course syllabus for COMS 540 Intercultural Communication Course description: Surveys communication transactions between members of differing cultures and studies definitions, models, values, beliefs, customs, and attitudes that affect intercultural communication. Relates culture to social perception and communication patterns. Examines culture-specific as well as cross-cultural modes of communication and identifies factors that impede effective intercultural understanding

Media Advocacy and LGBTI Identity

As part of an ongoing research project on media advocacy and the LGBTI identities, I was awarded a University Research Grant with funding to travel to New York to participate in media training by GLAAD. The content, skills and training strategies employed by GLAAD are being used in the larger, ongoing international research project. In March 2017, the research team is conducting media advocacy training for non-profit LGBT advocacy organizations in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The training workshops will include strategies from GLAAD and generate qualitative data concerning the discursive construction and mediated representations of sexual and gender minorities in Vietnam. This presentation will address media advocacy for marginalized populations and the utility of creative focus groups in research. I will also be able to provide preliminary impressions on the data collected in Vietnam and how it compares with previous research we’ve published on the discursive construction of LGBT

COMS 540 Intercultural Communication

Course syllabus for COMS 540 Intercultural Communication Course description: Surveys communication transactions between members of differing cultures and studies definitions, models, values, beliefs, customs, and attitudes that affect intercultural communication. Relates culture to social perception and communication patterns. Examines culture-specific as well as cross-cultural modes of communication and identifies factors that impede effective intercultural understanding

COMS 505 Rhetoric and Popular Culture

Course syllabus for COMS 505 Rhetoric and Popular Culture Course description: This course explores the relationship between U.S. culture and popular, mass-mediated texts from a variety of communication perspectives. It focuses on the critical analysis of popular culture within social and political contexts and emphasizes multicultural influences and representations in everyday life. It examines popular culture as a source and site of personal, social, and cultural identities

Queer Praxis: Questions for LGBTQ Worldmaking

Amidst rapid advances of mainstream gay and lesbian platforms, questions of essential sexual identities, queered rituals of family, queered notions of intimacy, queer considerations of time, and the possibility and value of queered systems of relation are largely absent. Resisting the public face of a normative and homogenous gay and lesbian community, and embracing a broadened conception of queerness, this book brings together 29 writers – a diverse community of scholars, lovers, and activists – to explore queer theory and embodied experiences within interpersonal relations and society at large. Enacting a critical intervention into the queer theoretical landscape, the book offers an alternative engagement where contributors centralize lived experience. Theoretical engagements are generated in relation and in dialogue with one another exploring collectivity, multiple points of entrance, and the living nature of critical theory. Readers gain familiarity with key concepts in queer thought, but also observe how these ideas can be navigated and negotiated in the social world. Queer Praxis serves as a model for queer relationality, enlisting transnational feminist, critical communication, and performance studies approaches to build dialogue across and through differing subjectivities.https://opus.govst.edu/faculty_books/1066/thumbnail.jp

Communicating Identity: Critical Approaches

Communicating Identity: Critical Approaches provides a poststructuralist engagement with contemporary theories of identity, which view identity as a construction, negotiation, and a process of communicative messages. Embracing an intersectional investigation of identity and examining the critical interworkings of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation, this edited anthology contemplates the shifting and fluid dimensions of identities within spatial, temporal, and discursive contexts. Bringing together works from scholars in the disciplines of organizational communication, critical/cultural studies, rhetorical and media studies, performance studies, and intercultural communication, the text is divided into four sections: Theorizing Identity provides a poststructuralist introduction to identity through differing conceptual frameworks that highlight the performative, relational, and intersectional dimensions of identity formations. Organizing Identity looks to institutional and national contexts to examine how systems of power and hierarchal structures within organizing discourses work to shape, mold, constrain, and produce disciplined identities. Representing Identity looks to popular culture, online environments, and personal accounts of experience as sites of identity production and negotiation.https://opus.govst.edu/faculty_books/1036/thumbnail.jp