Communication Commons^™

Accented And Silenced Voices, Ahmet Atay

Journal of Communication Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Strong Black Woman: Navigating Resilience And Mental Health Using Social Media For Culturally Tailored Resources, Muchaneta N.M. Chikawa

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Society views the strength of Black women as commendable as it shows positive qualities such as resilience and perseverance. While these traits are characterized as positive, Black women’s survival in American society has heavily depended on their strength, resulting in mental health illnesses such as anxiety and depression. The idea that Black women must exude strength and fortitude through adversity is labeled the Strong Black Woman Schema (SBWS). The SBWS is a race-gender schema that prescribes culturally-specific feminine expectations for Black women.

There are limited culturally-tailored resources for Black women to address mental health at collegiate institutions. As a result …

Dishes Of Yesteryear: Memories, Stories, And Representations Of The Past Within Food Media, Diana Willis Bottomley

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

In 1963, Julia Child revolutionized cooking television. Child’s The French Chef, which ran for ten years on the Boston public television station, WGBH, changed how American’s viewed, produced, and consumed food. And in the sixty years since Child’s debut, food media has grown in scope and popularity, increasingly altering how we communicate identity in and through food and foodways. In this dissertation, I examine the relation between food, media, and memory, with particular attention to: how the past moderates the connection between food and identity; how food media produce a sense of place integral to identity; and how food …

Gun Control Agendas In Networked Digital Environment: An Intermedia Comparison Between News Outlets, Activism Media, And Ephemeral Websites, Qian Li, Chun Shao, Shawn Walker, K. Hazel Kwon

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

This study explores the intermedia agenda-setting of the U.S. gun control movement in 2018, with a specific focus on the role of activism/advocacy media and ephemeral websites in shaping the movement discourse in news outlets. Structural topic modeling and cross-lagged correlation analyses of the Facebook URLs Share dataset show that activism/advocacy media played an important role in proposing unique agendas and aligning them with other news outlets. Meanwhile, ephemeral websites were prone to containing conspiratorial information, which could have been purposive to influence the movement. The study provides empirical insights into how various media actors interact to shape social movement …

Developing A Framework For Equitable Media Literacy Practice: Voices From The Field, Patrick R. Johnson, Melissa Tully, Bobbie Foster, Paul Mihailidis, Srividya Ramasubramanian, Shannon Burth, Emily Riewestahl

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

The article presents a framework for equitable media literacy practice (EMLP), which changes structure, action, and agency in service of an imagined and inclusive future and makes space for equitable civic and educational experiences. We derived this framework from 28 in-depth interviews with media literacy practitioners across the US. We asked these practitioners what EMLP would mean to them and what challenges and opportunities for EMLP emerge within their individual and organizational contexts. Interviewees acknowledge that equity is difficult to achieve given daily individual, community, and social concerns but is an important component of civic engagement.

Mitigating Organizational Conspiracy Beliefs Through Strategic Internal Communication And Employee–Organization Relationships (Eor) In The Workplace, Young Kim, Hyunji (Dana) Lim

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

The purpose of this study is to explore how strategic internal communication and the quality of employee – organization relationship (EOR) can reduce organizational conspiracy beliefs among employees and thus prevent the negative outcomes thereof in the workplace. Using a national survey (N = 810) of full-time employees in the United States, this study found that high-quality EOR based on two-way symmetrical communication with employees is likely to reduce the potential for conspiracy theories and, in turn, for turnover intentions in the workplace. This finding provides meaningful insight into how internal communication managers can mitigate negative employee outcomes that …

Mapping Media Literacy Impact In The U.S.: A Review Of Literature And Call For Equity, Shannon Burth, Emily Riewestahl, Srividya Ramasubramanian, Bobbie Foster, Patrick R. Johnson, Paul Mihailidis, Melissa Tully

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

While media literacy has grown to encompass many topics to provide learners with the skills required to be active citizens and savvy media consumers, there is no clear conceptual framework to define ‘impact.’ This review of literature aims to understand how recent U.S.-based media literacy scholarship defines impact. We analyzed 300 articles published from 2010 to 2020 on the impact of media literacy initiatives in the U.S. We propose the 6 E’s as a framework that captures six categories that media literacy researchers use to describe the impact of media literacy interventions: Evaluation Outcomes, Enquiry, Expression, Experiential Learning, Engaged Citizenship, …

Designing Equitable Media Literacy Interventions For Critical Youth Agency, Bobbie Foster, Paul Mihailidis, Patrick R. Johnson, Shannon Burth, Melissa Tully, Srividya Ramasubramanian, Emily Riewestahl

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

In recent years, young people engaged in political discourse and civic action online. U.S.-based social movements centered on equity issues, such as Black Lives Matter, Dreamers, and March for Our Lives, engaged young people in shaping and publicizing the goals of these movements through digital platforms. Increasingly in communities at the margins, young Americans need digital and media literacy skills to supplement contentious education restrictions within the United States, as with many state bills curtailing the teaching of LGBTQIA+ histories and critical race theory. With these considerations in mind, our team conducted a national study of impactful media literacy in …

Unraveling Structured Routine: An Exploration Of Audiences’ Habits In The Post-Network Age, Chun Shao

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

Over the past decades, audience researchers have strived to investigate the impact of traditional and emerging factors on audiences’ television viewing behaviors. With the popularity of streaming services, the way people consume and discuss media content has been fundamentally transformed. However, academic understanding of the extent to which habits impact people’s practices of viewing streamed content remains limited. By employing a mixed-methods approach that combines data collected via in-depth interviews and browser extensions from a group of Netflix users in the United States, this study found that participants’ viewing habits determine not only when they watch but also how and …

Language-Related Misunderstanding At Work: What It Is, Why It Occurs And What Organizations Can Do About It, John Fiset, Devasheesh P. Bhave

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Language is the foundation of human interaction. It plays a central role in facilitating effective communication by allowing people to express their thoughts, share essential information and establish connections with one another.

Extending Athlete Reputational Crises: Theorizing Underperformance Crises And The Flip Appeal, Lillian B. Feder, Diana Zulli

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

Crisis management scholarship recommends matching crisis response with crisis type to repair reputational damage. However, focusing on the corporate context has limited our understanding of crisis types and available responses. One crisis context yet to be extensively explored is sport/fan interactions online, an increasing site for athlete crises. This article addresses this gap, developing a theoretical framework for underperformance crises, where online publics perceive athletic underperformance as a norm violation that merits excessive hate toward athletes. Using the crisis case of basketball player E. J. Liddell, whose underperformance during a 2021 March Madness game resulted in widespread online harassment, we …

Ireland, Intellectual Property And The Political Economy Of Information Monopolies, Kenneth W. Murphy

Articles

Ireland’s policies towards US-owned global digital intermediaries (Big Tech) have emerged as an international political issue and received global media attention. So far, political and media focus has been on the impact of Ireland’s tax policies on the revenue-raising ability of other European states and perceptions of light touch regulation of those corporations based in the Republic. The current paper will focus on how Ireland’s switch to a focus on capital allowances for the sizeable American tech corporations has enabled the latter to sustain their dominance in the digital transition through incentivizing and subsidizing their switch to assetization as a …

Body-Oriented Gesture Generation System For Medical Interpreter Robots Based On Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback, Tung Ngo, Emma Murphy, Conor Mcginn, Robert Ross

Conference papers

Medical interpreters are crucial in facilitating communication between healthcare stakeholders who speak different languages. Body-oriented gestures convey critical information essential for accurate and high-quality interpretation in healthcare settings. This study introduces a body-oriented gesture generation system designed for medical interpreter robots based on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The system allows robots to interpret more naturally and improve over time through interactions with humans. By adopting a human-centered development approach, we tailor our system to address the actual needs of healthcare stakeholders.

Perceptions Of Professionals, Faculty, And Students Regarding The Implementation Of An Agricultural Communications Degree Program In The United Kingdom, Jefferson D. Miller, Abby Davis, Kobina Danful Fanyinkah, Alex Mcleod, Cassandra Cox, Jill Rucker

Agricultural Education, Communications and Technology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The purpose of this study was to determine the perceptions of professionals, faculty, and students regarding the implementation of an agricultural communications degree program in the United Kingdom (U.K). It aimed to gather detailed opinions to aid in the planning of future agricultural communications curricula in the U.K., where no formal academic programs in this discipline exist in higher education. This study used a qualitative approach in the form of interviews to gain in-depth opinions on four different research objectives. Participants were pooled from three different demographic groups in the U.K: industry professionals, faculty, and students. These stakeholder expressed that …

You Shall Know A Forum By The Words They Keep: Analyzing Language Use In Accessibility Forums For Blind Users, Nithiya Venkatraman, Anand Aiyer, Yash Prakash, Vikas Ashok

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Discussion forums are one of the favored platforms for knowledge sharing. Given their popularity, copious research exists on understanding linguistic and behavioral characteristics of forum conversations. However, prior investigations have mainly focused on general forums designed primarily for sighted users, and as such the applicability of their findings to the dedicated accessibility discussion forums frequented by blind individuals remains unanswered. To bridge this knowledge gap, and facilitate the development of better-informed assistive technologies for blind people, we investigated language use and identified the key semantic and cognitive characteristics of online accessibility forums. To aid our investigation, we collected a dataset …

Evaluating Social Media Reach Via Mainstream Media Discourse, Himarsha R. Jayanetti

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This study examines the intersection between social media and mainstream television (TV) news with an aim to understand how social media content amplifies its impact through TV broadcasts. While many studies emphasize social media as a primary platform for information dissemination, they often underestimate its total influence by focusing solely on interactions within the platform. This research examines instances where social media posts gain prominence on TV broadcasts, reaching new audiences and prompting public discourse. By using TV news closed captions, on-screen text recognition, and social media logo detection, we analyze how social media is referenced in TV news. Our …

Beyond Binary: Revealing Variations In Islamophobic Content With Hierarchical Multi-Class Classification, Esraa Aldreabi, Khawlah M. Harahsheh, Mukul Dev Chhangani, Chung-Hao Chen, Jeremy Blackburn

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

In the digital age, the rise of Islamophobia-marked by an irrational fear or discrimination against Islam and Muslims-has emerged as a pressing issue, especially on social media platforms. In this paper we employs a multi-class classification system, moving beyond traditional binary models. We categorize Islamophobic content into three main classes and various subclasses, covering a range from subtle biases to explicit incitement. Comparative analysis of data from Reddit and Twitter illuminates the distinct prevalence and types of Islamophobic content specific to each platform. This paper deepens our understanding of digital Islamophobia and provides insights for crafting targeted online counter strategies. …

Toward Inclusivity: Rethinking Islamophobic Content Classification In The Digital Age, Esraa Aldreabi, Mukul Dev Chhangani, Khawlah M. Harahsheh, Justin M. Lee, Chung-Hao Chen

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper, we implement a comprehensive three-class system to categorize social media discussions about Islam and Muslims, enhancing the typical binary approach. These classes are: I) General Discourse About Islam and Muslims, II) Criticism of Islamic Teachings and Figures, and III) Comments Against Muslims. These categories are designed to balance the nuances of free speech while protecting diverse groups like Muslims, ex-Muslims, LGBTQ+ communities, and atheists. By utilizing machine learning and employing transformer-based models, we analyze the distribution and characteristics of these classes in social media content. Our findings reveal distinct patterns of user engagement with topics related to …

‘Routines’ And ‘Formulaic Language’ In Conversation Analysis (Author's Extended Data), Danielle M. Pillet-Shore

Faculty Publications

Though the field of conversation analysis (CA) was founded upon examinations of interactional “routines” such as conversation openings and closings, conceptualizing and categorizing communicative phenomena as “formulaic” is anathema to CA. This chapter details how, since its inception, CA work has empirically elucidated how participants to recorded episodes of naturally occurring social interaction actively and collaboratively accomplish conversational activities as ‘routine’ or not by selecting from available action alternatives, spontaneously coordinating their selections vis-à-vis one another. Taking a multimodal CA approach, this chapter reviews state-of-the art literature on how people open and close in-person and telephone conversations, showing the immense …

The Regenarrative: How To Change The Story In Order To Change The Future, S. Rose Bigheart O'Leary

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Abstract

In the era of Climate Change, many are concerned that the end of the Anthropocene, or the end of the era of human life on Earth, is upon us. Western European colonialism and its subsequent systems (settler-colonialism, colonial-capitalism, and globalization - sometimes termed “neocolonialism”) have all been implicated in contributing to unsustainable behaviors linked to accelerating climate change. In searching for possible solutions, some have called for listening to Indigenous Peoples, citing ethics of sustainability found among many Indigenous cultures. However, the cultural products of settler-colonialism are still dominant in ways that do not allow for Indigenous worldviews to …

University Of Nebraska–Lincoln, Big Ten Scholarly Publishing, Sue Ann Gardner

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Presentations

Slides of a presenttation about the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University Libraries' scholarly publishing activities, given online at the Big Ten Scholarly Publishing Group monthly meeting on December 19, 2024.

Victim Advocates' Experiences In The Provision Of Domestic Violence Services For Jewish Women, Michael Sue Jenefsky

Theses and Dissertations

Domestic violence is a serious, dangerous global epidemic and does not discriminate. Domestic violence has no limitations happening in all communities, religions, and cultures. There are many types of abuse, and it is not always physical; however, the underlying threat of violence is perceived by victims. Abusers use manipulative and coercive tactics to gain and maintain power and control of victims. It is deliberate and a choice. Feelings of shame, guilt, blame, failure, helplessness, and being trapped with no means to escape are prevalent among victims. Jewish women have specific feelings and fears that are associated with halakha, Jewish law, …

Recommendations For Generation Z Civic Engagement On College Campuses, Grace A. Edwards

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Because there is little existing research specifically about Generation Z civic engagement in higher education in the United States, comparisons must be made with research about different generations’ voting and civic engagement patterns, specifically Millennials, since they share many similarities with Gen Z, and Gen Z civic engagement in different countries. This, paired with survey data and statistics about Gen Z civic engagement, provide a strong foundation for this project. To supplement this literature review, interviews with industry professionals were held to learn more about the environment of Gen Z civic engagement on college campuses. From these different sources of …

The Impact Of Covid-19 On Dancers, Mackenzie Weakland

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

COVID-19 impacted every person who experienced it. Dancers in particular, were a group of people that were not able to participate in their art form in the way that they were always able to. This project explores how COVID-19 impacted dancers and their ability to learn and grow.

Simply Butter (One Pat At A Time), Maddie Mcsweeney

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Simply Butter (one pat at a time) is an investigation of food and intimacy through sculpture, installation, performance, printmaking, and recordkeeping. In this series of Happenings, I explore themes of love, loss, and empathy while dealing with emotions related to grief and mental health issues. I look to cultural phenomena and art history figures who are concerned with similar sentiments to make conceptual connections and inform my choices when creating this project. Drawn to silliness and the absurd, I use the rudimentary yet familiar form of a stick of butter to act as a monolithic stand-in for the emotionally, mentally, …

Grace House Akron Volunteer Information And Training Kit, Lilly Wright

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Grace House Akron is a non-profit organization that provides housing and care to people on hospice who are homeless, living in indignant conditions, or do not have an able and/or willing caregiver. Over the course of Grace House’s first year in operation, they have worked alongside over 200 volunteers. Now, they are seeking to expand the demographic makeup of these volunteers. The objective of this project is to create a deliverable volunteer kit that will include 4 sections: Introduction, In-House Volunteering, Out-of-House Volunteering, and Reference Materials. This kit will streamline the process of onboarding volunteers by introducing them to the …

Master Of Social Work Portfolio, Amber Thornton

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

This reflection on my journey through the Master of Social Work (MSW) program highlights the transformative influence of critical self-reflection, research, policy analysis, and leadership in shaping my development as a social worker. The program has equipped me with key competencies to engage effectively with individuals, families, groups, and communities, promoting empowerment and advancing social justice. Through hands-on experiences in individual engagement, family assessment, group intervention, and organizational evaluation, I have gained a holistic understanding of social work that emphasizes empathy, tailored interventions, and systemic change. My involvement in policy practice and advocacy has underscored the importance of evidence-based research …

Social Media And Performative Parenting, Sun Sun Lim, Yang Wang

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

With the intensifying use of social media in many realms of everyday life, even parenting is manifesting a public dimension. Whereas one might regard parenting as a private activity undertaken within the home, the use of social media to highlight the joys and trials of child-rearing has put parenting under the digital spotlight. Parents are keen to showcase their children’s growth and development to family and friends. Significant achievements invite praise and social endorsement, as well as commendations for excellent parenting. The sharing of parenting struggles over social media can also elicit expressions of commiseration, sympathy and support. The ensuing …

An Endemic Issue: Malawi's Struggle To Prevent Childhood Malaria, Hailey A. Smalley

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Malaria is one of the most prolific diseases in the world, generating hundreds of millions of cases and hundreds of thousands of deaths a year. In 2021, the World Health Organization initiated preliminary trials for the first malaria vaccine in three countries, including Malawi. This project explores the impact of the malaria vaccine on community perspectives and health outcomes related to malaria , describes ongoing challenges that health workers face when disseminating the vaccine, and explains how Malawi’s experience implementing the malaria vaccine reflects larger trends in international aid.

Influencers Endorsement Advertising Methods On Different Social Media Platforms, Sophia R. Annaloro

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Social media marketing has opened a unique spot for Social Media Influencers. With their fame comes a lot of power over their follower's actions. Many things are at play when an influencer works with a brand to create promotional content for a product. Flow theory suggests that an abrupt advertisement does not match the pace or aesthetic of the content they are currently consuming. When one's viewing is abruptly interrupted by an advertisement, the consumers are now aggravated by the product. Distinctive characteristics of different platforms are likely to develop flow differently. This study analyzed how passive versus active product …