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.
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.
The Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) congratulates Professor Mohan Dutta for being ranked among the Top 0.5% of all scholars worldwide by ScholarGPS.
ScholarGPS “provides rankings of individuals and institutions Overall (in all Fields) in 14 broad Fields and in 350,000+ Specialities.
Professor Dutta is ranked 12 worldwide in his field of Journalism for his research accomplishments over the prior 5 Years and is ranked 30 worldwide in Journalism in the Lifetime.
In his specialisation area of Cultural Studies, he is ranked number 7 worldwide for prior 5 Years. During the same period, he is ranked 4 worldwide for the quality of his scholarship. He is ranked 17 in the area of Cultural Change.
For his accomplishments in the area of Social Change, he is ranked 35 worldwide in the Lifetime. He is ranked 18 worldwide over the prior 5 Years for his productivity in the scholarship of Social Change, and 24 for his productivity in area over Lifetime.
