Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Mapping Injustice: The World Is Witness, Place-Framing, And The Politics Of Viewing On Google Earth, Joshua P. Ewalt

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Working from assumptions that inequality is often spatially informed, a set of interactive cartographies has recently proliferated on Google Earth. In this essay, I analyze one of those interactive cartographies: The World is Witness produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). I read the map as an organizational rhetoric that frames place as "embedded injustice." I also argue that thorough analysis of the framing of local place on Google Earth must inherently question whether the map can create a disruption in the viewing subject. While the map presents vital information on excruciatingly despicable acts of injustice, and the …

Negotiating Tensions Across Organizational Boundaries: Communication And Refugee Resettlement Organizations, Sarah Steimel

Department of Communication Studies: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Voluntary non-profit organizations play a critical role in mediating the transition of refugees into their new host communities in the United States. Furthermore, mediation is fundamentally a communicative phenomenon, as social services are provided in through communication between nonprofit workers and clients. Critically, for voluntary mediating organizations to create empowering spaces for refugees, communication is central. In this study, I emphasize the tensional processes inherent to mediating interactions and explore how refugee resettlement organizational staff members and refugee-clients describe and manage the communicative tensions which emerge when they interact with one another.

I conducted eighteen in-depth interviews with fifteen organizational …

Psychological Net Worth: Finding The Balance Between Psychological Capital And Psychological Debt, Michele L. Millard

Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communication: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Scholarship

This multi-level study examined a proposed framework of psychological net worth that builds on the current psychological capital conceptualization of positive psychological assets provided to an organization by articulating the construct of psychological debt or those psychological liabilities in an organization. By describing psychological debt as a collection of negative attributes that occur at the individual level for individuals that hamper productivity, morale, and effectiveness in organizations, this framework of psychological net worth proposes the need to create a psychological balance sheet of psychological capital and debt. Psychological debt is described using the dimension of emotional labor, job insecurity, job …

How New Librarians Used Branding And Outreach To Create Communities Of Practice, Kiyomi D. Deards

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Conference Presentations and Speeches

Want to get involved and make a difference? Come learn how one librarian got involved and used branding and outreach to promote and increase membership in their professional service organization, and developed their personal community of practice. Find out how you can get involved professionally. Learn how you can define and promote a unique brand for a professional group or yourself, and see how getting involved can exponentially increase your professional network while serving others.

The Working Class Promise: A Communicative Account Of Mobility-Based Ambivalences, Kristen Lucas

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

In-depth interviews with 62 people with working class ties (blue-collar workers and adult sons and daughters of blue-collar workers) reveal a social construction of working class that imbues it with four core, positively valenced values: strong work ethic, provider orientation, the dignity of all work and workers, and humility. This constellation of values is communicated through a ubiquitous macrolevel discourse—which I coin the Working Class Promise—that elevates working class to the highest position in the social class hierarchy and fosters a strong commitment to maintain a working class value system and identity. However, this social construction is only a partial …

Blue-Collar Discourses Of Workplace Dignity: Using Outgroup Comparisons To Construct Positive Identities, Kristen Lucas

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

People generally possess a strong desire to construct positive, dignified work identities. However, this goal may be more challenging for some people, such as blue-collar workers, whose occupations may not offer qualities typically associated with workplace dignity. Interviews with 37 people from a blue-collar mining community reveal three central identity discourses about workplace dignity: All jobs are important and valuable; dignity is located in the quality of the job performed; and dignity emerges from the way people treat and are treated by others. Participants communicated these themes by backgrounding their own occupations and drawing comparisons between two outgroups, low-status, low-paid …

Socializing Messages In Blue-Collar Families: Communicative Pathways To Social Mobility And Reproduction, Kristen Lucas

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

This study explicitly links processes of anticipatory socialization to social mobility and reproduction. An examination of the socializing messages exchanged between blue-collar parents (n=41) and their children (n=25) demonstrate that family-based messages about work and career seldom occur in straightforward, unambiguous ways. Instead, messages take several paths (direct, indirect, ambient, and omission). Further, the content of messages communicated along these paths often is contradictory. That is, sons and daughters receive messages that both encourage and discourage social mobility. Ultimately, these individuals must negotiate the meanings of family-based anticipatory socialization communicated to them through a mix of messages.