CARE | Future Directions Of Applied Communication Research Lecture Series
We are pleased to announce the Fifth Lecture in the Future Directions Of Applied Communication Research Lecture Series, by Professor Heather Zoller, University of Cincinnati on “The Future of Applied Communication Research: Theory/Practice and Pragmatic Utopianism in a Time of Crises.”
Professor. Heather Zoller, discusses continued challenges in conceptualizing applied communication research from her vantage point as Editor of the Journal of Applied Communication Research and a critical health and organizational communication scholar. She outlines an agenda for developing communication theories and practices that meet the major sociopolitical and economic crises of our time. She then describes critical pragmatism as one avenue for developing applied research, and discusses “pragmatic utopianism” as an exemplar of applying communication insights to challenge the status quo and foster equitable and democratic social change.
Bio:
Heather M. Zoller is a Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati where she directs the Communicating Health, Science, Environment, and Risk Certificate. She is the Editor-in-Chief at the Journal of Applied Communication Research and former Senior Editor at Health Communication and Management Communication Research. Her research investigating organizing for healthy work in sustainable and equitable economic systems is published in outlets such as Communication Monographs, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Human Relations, and the Handbook of Organizational Communication Theory and Research. She co-edited the volume “Emerging Perspectives in Health Communication” with Mohan Dutta. She is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine NIOSH committee on PPE, and served as Board President for Ohio Citizen Action Education Fund. (See https://www.heatherzoller.com/.)
Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) is proud to share that Prof. Mohan Dutta, Massey University will be featuring at the PACMRI Masterclass 2024 on 11 October 2024 | 3PM Philippine Time on Zoom and Facebook LIVE with renowned scholars.
Debbie S. Dougherty(Ph.D. University of Nebraska, 2000) is Professor of Communication at University of Missouri. Her research focuses on power and organizing, particularly as it relates to sexual harassment, social class, and emotions. with publications in places such as Harvard Business Review, Human Relations,Journal of Communication, Human Communication Research, Communication Monographs, Management Communication Quarterly, Journal of Applied Communication Research, and Sex Roles.
She has also provided organizational communication training and development in a number of organizations and has been extensively utilized as a resource for news sources such as the New York Times, Newsweek, Forbes, and the Oprah Magazine.
Prof. Dougherty has received a number of awards, including the Organizational Communication Book of the Year and Textbook of the Year, NCA Applied Communication Scholar Award, The Jack Kay Award for Engaged Research, the Management Communication Quarterly Article of the Year Award, the Norman K. Denzin Qualitative Research Award, the Excellence in Education Award, and the Gold Chalk Award for graduate student mentoring.
The latest Ayaan Institute podcast episode features an insightful discussion with Professor Mohan J Dutta from Massey University. Dive into his groundbreaking research on Global Hindutva and its impact on the #Leicester disorder in September 2022. This episode also explores the connections between #Hindutva, far-right narratives, and violence.
This podcast was streamed LIVE and recorded on 2nd October.
We argue that engaging diverse publics in ongoing instructional communication is critical to effectively managing risks, mitigating harms, and responding to crises in a complex global risk society. Communication theory becomes meaningful for achieving these goals only when it is applied directly to and with the risk-bearers it is intended to serve. Moreover, engaging stakeholders in the co-construction of meaning and decision-making inherent in effective instructional communication must be ongoing. In this presentation, we explore strategies for doing so effectively using the IDEA model for effective instructional risk and crisis communication as a framework.
Deanna D. Sellnow (Ph.D.) is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Clemson University. Dr. Sellnow’s research focuses on strategic instructional communication in the contexts of health, risk, safety, and crisis communication (e.g., natural disasters, health, food safety, pandemics, biosecurity, terrorism, biotechnology). She has conducted funded research for the United States Geological Survey (USGS), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), United States Department of Education (DOE), United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), World Health Organization (WHO), and the German Research Foundation (DFG). She is former President of the Central States Communication Association where she was inducted into the Fall of Fame in 2018. She currently serves as the founding Executive Director of the International Crisis and Risk Communication Association (ICRCA) and has been co-host of the International Crisis and Risk Communication Conference (ICRCC) since 2016. She is also past editor of the Journal of Communication Pedagogy, Communication Teacher, and the Basic Communication Course Annual. She has authored or co-authored numerous books, book chapters, and refereed national and international journal articles. She has conducted and/or presented research in a variety of countries around the world. Her most recent book, co-authored with Dr. Timothy Sellnow, is Before Crisis: The Practice of Effective Risk Communication.
Timothy L. Sellnow is a professor of communication at Clemson University. His research focuses on risk and crisis communication. He has conducted funded research for the Department of Homeland Security, the United States Department of Agriculture, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States Geological Survey, and the World Health Organization. He has also served in an advisory role for the National Academy of Sciences, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the International Food and Information Council, and the Food and Drug Administration. He is past winner of the National Communication Association’s Gerald Phillips Award for Distinguished Applied Communication Scholarship and past editor or Journal of Applied Communication Research. He has co-authored seven books on risk and crisis communication and has published many refereed journal articles. His most recent book, co-authored with Dr. Deanna Sellnow, is Before Crisis: Strategies for Effective Risk Communication.
The trope of academic freedom in danger is a critical resource in the organised attack of the far-right on the modern university. One of the core techniques of the far-right in its efforts to destabilise academic institutions, is cook up a frenzy around free speech – intentionally conflating free speech issues with academic freedom. As an exemplar of the communicative inversions performed by the far-right, the panic around academic freedom is actually a critical tool in catalysing attacks on the academic freedom of decolonising practices in the university environment. What the far-right, and the underlying infrastructure of white supremacy is triggered by, is that universities are slowly transforming, starting to acknowledge that centuries of colonial epistemic violence have erased the knowledge infrastructures of colonised peoples.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, as I have demonstrated in my analyses, the Free Speech Union uses ideologically motivated faulty surveys to create panic around academic freedom. With a fundamentally incorrect understanding of academic freedom (the freedom of academics to teach and publish in their areas of expertise) that conflates it with free speech, the Union constructs its propaganda around specific ideological issues (Te Tiriti o Waitangi, gender justice, and so on) which are at the heart of the far- right’s culture war propaganda in Aotearoa.
In its most recent campaign, the Free Speech Union has turned to releasing leaked climate surveys to construct the argument that academic freedom is under threat in Aotearoa. Deploying the tactical tool of leaks, it builds an affective register around academic climates, suggesting these environments are threatening academic freedom.
In August, the Free Speech Union targeted the Law School at Auckland University of Technology (AUT), placing its propaganda around a leaked climate survey (to David Farrar, yes, the same David Farrar that runs the debunked Free Speech Union survey on academic freedom) that suggested faculty dissatisfaction. Commenting on the selective excerpts from the survey published on David Farrar’s blog, noted Jonathan Ayling, the Chief Executive of the Union:
“Academics are being criticised and punished for speaking out, causing them and others to resort to self-censorship. Again, results from an internal law school survey displayed very low levels of satisfaction. This included 30% claiming they feel uncomfortable reporting inappropriate behaviour and more than one-in-three respondents experiencing bullying in the past six months.”
Mr Ayling’s blog then reports on a letter sent out to the Minister of Education and the AUT Vice-Chancellor. When you look closely at the items shared on Mr Farrar’s blog however, there is not a single reported item on the blog that substantiates the claim “academics are being criticised and punished for speaking out.” You also won’t find an item that actually measures self-censorship.
In other words, the frame around threat to academic freedom that is part of the moral panic crafted by the Free Speech Union in its press release and the letter to the Minister of Education is not substantiated empirically. There is no evidence of academics being punished for speaking out, as Mr Ayling claims.
Professor Mohan Dutta.
Mr Farrar’s blog embellishes the ideological reading of the survey with leaked emails and speculations. The survey creates the opening for attacking the Dean of Law at AUT who had spoken out against the attack on the teaching of Tikanga Māori. Writes Mr Farrar: “Now readers will recall that the Dean of Law is Khylee Quince and she attracted a lot of publicity when she called a senior KC a racist dinosaur who should go off and die in the corner.” The blog wraps up by further constructing the Dean as threat to academic freedom:
“As you can see the results for the Law Faculty are much much lower than AUT as a whole. So this would suggest the major issue is not the central administration, but the faculty management itself. I am told by sources that everyone knows what the major problem is, but people are too scared to say so.”
Note here the slippage from the report of a leaked climate survey to hearsay – the architecture of gossip in: “everyone knows what the major problem is, but people are too scared to say so.”
It is worth noting the targeting of the AUT Dean of Law, Māori academic Khylee Quince, is part of a broader campaign targeting senior Māori academics (often women) who have spoken out publicly against the white supremacist structures that make up universities in settler colonial Aotearoa New Zealand, and their organised campaigns directed at erasing the decolonising registers that have been built through decades of struggle. The ideologically motivated campaign around academic freedom mobilised by Mr Farrar and Free Speech Union works on slippages to construct the narrative of academic freedom under threat. Implicit in this, is the positioning of Te Tiriti o Waitangi as a threat to academic freedom in Aotearoa.
Indeed, the academic climate of settler colonial universities, embedded in whiteness and mobilised to uphold white supremacy, has worked historically to erase decolonising registers of knowledge generation. Prevailing norms of whiteness have devalued and undermined Indigenous knowledge claims, often working aggressively to silence decolonising scholarship. The voices of Indigenous and postcolonial academics have historically been silenced, with the academic freedom to do decolonising scholarship severely constrained by the norms of whiteness, upheld by notions of civility and norms of communication within white academic structures.
As universities in Aotearoa New Zealand, as with universities across settler colonial spaces globally, have started their decolonising journeys around reconciliation and recognition of Indigenous rights, the far-right white supremacist campaign seeking to silence these efforts has worked incessantly to construct decolonisation as a threat to academic freedom. The implicit and explicit targeting of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the positioning of Te Tiriti in opposition to academic freedom must be read within the broader architecture of the global proliferation of white supremacist backlash against decolonisation. Any conversation on academic freedom must begin with the recognition that the far-right panic around academic freedom is a threat to the academic freedom of academics studying, teaching, researching and publicly engaging on decolonisation, postcolonial theory, critical race theory etc. It must also be noted that academics teaching and researching in these areas have historically faced diverse intersecting forms of marginalisation, harassment, and threats to their academic freedom.
Professor Mohan Dutta is Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication. He is the Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE), developing culturally-centered, community-based projects of social change, advocacy, and activism that articulate health as a human right. He is a member of the board of the International Communication Association.
The Culture-Centred Approach (CCA) is a transformative framework in communication research, emphasizing the role of culture in shaping communication practices, health outcomes, and societal structures.
This meta-theory challenges traditional top-down models of communication by centering the voices of marginalized communities in the co-construction of health and social policies. By focusing on the intersections of power, agency, and structure, CCA advances a critical understanding of how communication can address social inequalities and injustices.
The methods that anchor the CCA are grounded in ethnography, activist collaborations, creative expressions, and participatory action research, working directly with communities to co-create voice infrastructures that foreground their lived experiences and the structural barriers they face. Through collaborative processes, CCA scholars co-create solutions and frameworks that are culturally relevant and locally situated, ensuring that communication interventions align with the needs of the people they intend to serve. These interventions range from co-building hospitals and co-designing health services, co-designing architectures for sustainable living, co-designing sustainable community-grounded food systems, building cultural spaces of healing, co-creating health promotion interventions to co-creating advocacy efforts, supporting land occupations through communication plans, mobilizing social movements, and co-designing 360 degrees promotional campaigns seeking to impact upstream policies.
In practice, CCA research builds sustainable dialogues with communities at the margins that challenge dominant discourses, emphasizing community agency and empowerment. Researchers engage with marginalized groups to amplify their voices, co-produce knowledge, and effect structural change in areas like health communication, environmental justice, and public policy. This bottom-up, community-led approach ensures that communication strategies are deeply rooted in the cultural contexts of the communities involved and are owned by communities who have been historically disenfranchised.
The CARE Conversations on the Culture-Centred Approach (CCA) Lecture Series will explore the theoretical foundations, research methods, and practical applications of the CCA, highlighting how it has been used to transform health communication and create lasting change.
Lecture 1: Building, Extending, and Evaluating Culture-Centred Scholarship: Insights from a Metatheoretical Systematic Review of CCA in Health Communication
Topic: Building, Extending, and Evaluating Culture-Centred Scholarship: Insights from a Metatheoretical Systematic Review of CCA in Health Communication
Speaker: Dr. Shaunak Sastry, Ph.D., Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati
Dr. Shaunak Sastry, Ph.D. is Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati and Director of The Cincinnati Project, a center for community-engaged research in the College of Arts & Sciences at UC. He is the 2024-2025 Provostal Fellow for community-engaged research at UC. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of critical health communication, globalization, and infectious disease politics. His award-winning research has been published in leading international peer-reviewed journals like Human Communication Research, Communication Theory, Health Communication, Journal of Health Communication, Communication Monographs, Culture, Health & Sexuality, Frontiers in Communication, and Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, in addition to several book chapters and more than 50 paper presentations at national and international conferences. He is a senior editor of the journal Health Communication and sits on the editorial board of several other leading academic journals. He is the Chair of the National Communication Association’s (NCA) Research Council and serves on its Executive Committee. Dr. Sastry teaches courses in health communication, globalization, and research methods at the undergraduate and graduate level in the School of Communication, Film & Media Studies at UC.
Professor Angela Cooke-Jackson is an acclaimed scholar of health communication, exploring the intersections of race, gender and reproductive health justice. She is a Professor within the Communication Studies Department at California State University, Los Angeles.
Professor Cooke-Jackson’s cross-disciplinary scholarship and applied approach incorporates digital platforms, media literacy and civic engagement to unpack health issues among at-risk urban youth and women of colour. She has worked extensively to construct theory and build research that addresses sexual health, sexuality and sexual health literacy.
Director of the Center for Culture-Centered Approach for Research and Evaluation (CARE) Professor Mohan Dutta says Professor Cooke-Jackson is a long-time interlocutor on the intersections of culture and health communication.
“I am looking forward to this opportunity for us to explore together the various threads of communication and anti-racist organising that weave across global spaces in challenging the entrenched health disparities we witness globally today. That health communication work is fundamentally anti-racist work is a concept I am looking forward to further exploring with Professor Cooke-Jackson.”
During her time at CARE, Professor Cooke-Jackson will be collaborating with Professor Dutta on a framework for anti-racist solidarities as the basis for securing health justice.
She will be conducting a series of workshops, delivering public lectures and collaborating with Professor Dutta on writing white papers, policy briefs and journal articles on the futures of anti-racist solidarities as the basis for addressing health disparities.
Professor Cooke-Jackson will be hosted on Massey’s Manawatū campus in early 2025.
Earlier, CARE had hosted the health communication scholar Professor Barbara Sharf as a Fulbright Scholar.
This second lecture in the Future Directions of Applied Communication Research Lecture Series is from Professor Noshir Contractor from Northwestern University. It centres around network science and how it can support applied communication scholarship.
Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering, the School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He investigates how social and knowledge networks form and perform. He is the former President of the International Communication Association. He is also a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association and a Fellow of the Academy of Management, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Network Science Society, and the International Communication Association. He received the Lifetime Service Award from the Communication, Digital Technology, & Organization Division of the Academy of Management. Additionally, he received the Simmel Award from the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA). He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras where he received a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. He has a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California.
About the Lecturer: Prof. Gary Kreps is completing his 20th year on the faculty at George Mason University, where he currently serves as a Distinguished University Professor of Communication and Founding Director of the Center for Health and Risk Communication. Prof. Gary teaches courses concerning Communication Research, Health Communication, Risk Communication, Interpersonal Communication, Organizational Communication, Consumer-Provider Health Communication, Health Communication Campaigns, and Digital Communication.
Prior to joining the faculty at Mason, he had the pleasure of serving as the Founding Chief of the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch at the National Cancer Institute (NIH), where he planned, developed, and coordinated major new national research and outreach initiatives concerning risk communication, health promotion, behavior change, technology development, and information dissemination to promote effective cancer prevention, screening, control, care, and survivorship.
Prof. Gary also served as the Founding Dean of the School of Communication at Hofstra University, Executive Director of the Greenspun School of Communication at UNLV, and in faculty and administrative roles at Northern Illinois, Rutgers, Indiana, and Purdue Universities.
