Category: Qualitative Methods

Olivia begins the new year doing excellent community-based, health communication research

Lots of fantastic projects are on the agenda for M.A. student, Olivia Webster, this semester, and she’s able to take it all on with a cat on her head! 🙂 More specifically, she is continuing work with faculty member Marcie Young Cancio and Amplify Utah on a journalism-based storytelling project concerning those experiencing homelessness, and…

Research Meeting

On September 1st, I met with a group of awesome reproductive health students and researchers to begin a new collaboration on the communication of reproductive health information in the secondary-school sex education classroom. Dr. Madison Krall, Ph.D. student Gabby Garza, advanced undergraduate researchers Jasmine Aguilar Lopez and Miya Jordan, and I talked about coding and…

St. Patty’s Day Chemical Rhetoric Group Coding Meeting

A subset of the Chemical Rhetoric Group has been working on a project that has required lots of coding. Fortunately, we are all up for finding ways to make that process fun with a nod to St. Patty’s Day and a killer data management system (as you can see below). We should have used shades…

Dr. Amanda Boyd’s Research on Health Inequities and Community Participatory Research

The University of Utah has been such a hotspot for amazing speakers lately. We were so lucky to have Dr. Amanda Boyd, member of the Metis Nation of Alberta and Associate Professor in The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University, give the B. Aubrey Fisher Memorial Lecture on October 27th. She…

Introducing Dr. Madison Krall, in-coming Assistant Professor of Communication at Seton Hall University!

Several weeks ago, Madison entered a Zoom room with her Ph.D. Committee Members and, about two hours later, she left the room having earned a Doctorate of Philosophy (aka, a Ph.D.). She defended her dissertation research beautifully, and her excellent committee members (featured below) offered her amazing feedback and a double dose of CONGRATULATIONS because…

Madison is Elected Secretary of ARSTM at NCA 2021

At the National Communication Association Conference in November, Madison Krall was elected to the position of ARSTM Secretary. ARSTM stands for the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine, and I am very excited that Madison will be taking on a leadership role in this vibrant and growing group of scholars.

Dr. Melissa Parks accepts Faculty Position at Drexel University

Starting in January, Melissa will begin her new position on faculty in the Department of Communication at Drexel University, where she will teach classes and do research focused on non-profit communication. This allows her to draw from her extensive background in environmental, health, and intercultural communication, as well as her experience working with the Peace…

Defenses, Defenses, Kourtney Maison and Ashleigh McDonald Pass Their Defenses!

This fall has been a very successful one in terms of academic defenses for our group (please note that, although I used this image from a boxing correspondence course as a header for this post, I’m happy to report that none of our defenses ever turned to fisticuffs). At the end of October, Kourtney Maison…

Drs. Parks and Cullinan Earn Top Paper Award

Megan and Melissa learned recently that their paper, “Art-as-Pedagogy for Environmental Activism: The Rhetoric of Washed Ashore’s Ocean Plastics Exhibition,” won the Top Paper Award at the 2021 Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE). Woot, woot! Here is the announcement on Twitter. Their research is funded by a 2019 National Geographic Early Career Grant. I…

Dr. Melissa Parks’ research highlighted in NCA’s Communication Currents

Melissa’s Text and Performance Quarterly essay, “Ecocultural adjustment: Revisiting acculturation through a Peace Corps sojourn,” has recently been featured in the National Communication Association publication Communication Currents, which translates communication scholarship for lay audiences. Check out the Communication Currents piece here, and find links to Melissa’s original article here, with the complete citation below. Parks,…

Dr. Benjamin W. Mann

You can call him Dr. Mann! In mid-December, Benjamin Mann successfully defended his dissertation, “Intersectional Stigma Communication, Demi-rhetoricity, and Critical Health Communication: Affirming (Neuro)queer Subjectivities.” His committee members agreed that he had put together an important project grounded in interviews with hard-to-reach and often overlooked individuals and that his research would go a long way…

Melissa Parks Participates in the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Project

From May 20-23, Melissa Parks joined with other scholars and community activists in Reno, NV to take part in the RSA Project in Power, Place, and Publics: Rhetorical Cartographies. The group as a whole focused on rhetorically analyzing the University of Nevada, Reno Campus Master Plan. Melissa’s specific working group, led by Professor Bridie McGreavy…