Other Communication Commons^™

The Journey Of The Black Sports Journalist: Past, Present And Future, Gary Washburn

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Professional Projects

It took nearly 60 years for the mainstream audience to learn and digest the impact of the Black sports journalist on the American sports landscape.

In the Disney-movie “42,” detailing Jackie Robinson’s breaking of baseball’s color barrier in 1947, Robinson bonded with a journalist named Wendell Smith, who served as a guide, mentor and liaison for the baseball player during his travel journey with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Smith not only covered Robinson’s ground-breaking excursion into a sport that had proudly prohibited and disavowed Blacks from playing Major League Baseball, he became Robinson’s trusted colleague, gaining access to stories and insights …

Embracing Discursive Paradox: Consultants Navigating The Constitutive Tensions Of Diversity Work, Jennifer Mease (Also Peeksmease)

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This article addresses how diversity consultants manage the dual demands of social justice and organizational goals or priorities. I suggest that navigating this “discursive paradox” is one of—if not the—defining feature of diversity work. To investigate this discursive paradox, I analyze diversity work as a process (rather than a collection of products) as evidenced in interviews with 19 diversity consultants. The results offer two derivative discursive paradoxes that emerged in consultants’ talk about diversity work: the tension between broad and narrow constructions of human differences and the tension between emphasizing change at the organizational and individual levels. Rather than …

Reconsidering Consultants’ Strategic Use Of The Business Case For Diversity, Jennifer Mease (Also Peeksmease)

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

The business case for diversity—the practice of connecting human differences to an organization’s bottom line—has been critiqued for its compromised treatment of human difference. Through a grounded in action discursive analysis of 19 interviews with diversity consultants, this research identifies three occupational demands that prompted consultants to use the business case: organizational access, motivation, and emotion work. The analysis also identifies strategies consultants used that met these demands without relying on the business case: connecting to mission statements, connecting to individual tasks, appealing to personal experience, sequencing, combining, balancing discourses of emotion and business, drawing on spiritual grounding, and using …