The Rhetoric Society of America Conference took place in Denver this past May. It was truly a pleasure to see friends old and new and hear about fantastic ongoing projects. Below, amazing “old friends” I’ve known since graduate school (Jenell Johnson, Christa Olson, and Amy Wan). It’s so strange how none of us have aged…
This past fall I was so excited to receive the National Communication Association’s Golden Monograph Award for an article I published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 2022 entitled, “Re-envisioning fertility science: From J. Marion Sims’s invasive gynecology to Sophia Kleegman’s ‘conservative surgery’ hermeneutic.” I am so lucky to have a community of people…
Our team’s newest publication is hot off the presses at Management Communication Quarterly. Please read the full article at: Cullinan, M. E., Maison, K., Parks, M. M., Krall, M. A., Krebs, E., Mann, B., & Jensen, R. E. (2022). “Seedlings in the Corporate Forest: Communicating Benevolent Sexism in Dow’s First Internal Affirmative-Action Campaign.” Management Communication…
From July 14th to July 16th of this year, Madison Krall took part in the National Communication Association’s Doctoral Honors Seminar, which accepts just a few of the top Ph.D. students in the field to engage with great established scholars and workshop their dissertation projects. This year, the seminar was held virtually due to the…
Dr. Melissa Parks won the 2020 Dissertation Award in Environmental Communication from the National Communication Association for her dissertation, “From Redwoods Preservation to Genomic Restoration: Genocentric Ecologies in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries.” Woot, woot! Read about the award and Melissa’s research, here.
Melissa has been recognized with the 2019 Benson-Campbell Dissertation Award from the National Communication Association’s Public Address Division for her dissertation project, “From the Redwoods Conservation Movement to Genome Mapping: Genetic Ecologies of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.” She will be recognized for her project’s “conceptual rigor, important focus, and innovative approach” at the Public…
In mid-May I hopped a plane to Boston and made my way to Cambridge, MA to spend a week searching for archival documents concerning chemistry, women’s history, and reproductive health (not necessarily in that order).
We had a great day-long writing retreat over finals week this semester. The new Gardner Building on campus, which overlooks the mountains and the football stadium, was a great place to work on our projects.
https://www.natcom.org/nca-inside-out/5-questions-withrobin-jensen
Benjamin Mann published his article “Rhetoric of online disability activism: #CripTheVote and civic participation” in the ICA journal Communication, Culture & Critique. Well done, Ben!!
The amazing honors undergraduate student that I’m mentoring, Maya Kobe-Rundio, has been named a 2019-2020 Tanner Humanities Center Undergraduate Research Fellow. This fellowship will support her thesis research, “In Her Element: Outdoor Recreation as a Tool for Female Empowerment and Community Building.” Read more about Maya’s work, as well as the work of my colleagues…
This past spring, Melissa Parks was named the inaugural field experience graduate fellow at the Taft-Nicholson Environmental Humanities Education Center in Lakeview, MT. She spent the summer in Centennial Valley working with director, Mark Bergstrom, to further the Center’s mission concerning environmental education and communication. Way to go, Melissa!!
See below for information about the program, “Welcome to the Sandbox.” I will be giving a talk with Dr. Teri Thompson entitled, “Mastering Publishing: Tips and Tricks for Journal Articles and Books.” Join us for the Health Communication Division’s Doctoral Student and Early Career Faculty Health Communication Preconference At the 2018 National Communication Association Annual…
I loved wandering around Old Town. Above is an installation outside the Arch Street Meeting House. Below is the Liberty Bell, Benjamin Franklin’s grave, Christ Church, the Betsy Ross house, Luna Café (not quite as famous as the rest, but still fun), the Irish Immigrant’s Memorial, and the Franklin Fountain.
Earlier this year, I won a travel grant to visit the Othmer Library of Chemical History at Philadelphia’s Science History Institute. This allowed me to spend the last week in June combing through the library’s tremendous archives and exploring Old Town Philly. This is me taking up residence in the Othmer Library. The archives are…
Check out number #56–woot, woot!
The first is called Waiting for Babies, and you can listen here! Host Steven Mavros asks great, informed questions, and was such a pleasure to talk with. The second is called Beat Infertility, and you can listen here! Host Heather Huhman has one of the best radio voices I’ve ever heard, and her podcast was…
The ART of Infertility art exhibit visited Salt Lake City last month and featured the original art by Abigail Glass featured on the cover of my book. It was so amazing to see the work in person. I even got a Twitter shout-out from the Pennsylvania State University Press:). The exhibit’s showing was sponsored by…
Chemical Rhetoric Group member and Ph.D. student Benjamin W. Mann has been knocking it out of the park with not one but TWO new publications that have just come out. In the journal Health Communication, he has an article entitled “Autism Narratives in Media Coverage of the MMR Vaccine-Autism Controversy under a Crip Futurism Framework.”…
Richardson_2017_Review of Infertility_Bulletin of the History of Medicine The author of this review, Sarah S. Richardson, is a professor of History of Science and of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. She is also the author of this really important Nature article on the implications for women of recent epigenetic-inspired public commentary.
Founder of the Department of Speech at the University of Utah, Maud May Babcock was also the University’s first female faculty member. Today she is recognized with this plaque in downtown Salt Lake City. Over the years, Professor Babcock inspired many to achieve academic prominence. Most recently, doctoral students in the Department of Speech Communication…
I had the great honor of presenting Blake Scott with the 2017 Health Communication Division’s Distinguished Book Award. His book, Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing, instigated the sub-field of rhetoric of health and medicine and is long overdue for recognition. Congratulations Blake!
All of these are outstanding. Two of them I bought as gifts for other people and then couldn’t stop reading them. One was a gift–thank you Gretchen Jensen! None of them have to do directly with my research, which made them a really nice way to take a break.
Posing, above, with all of the 2017 awardees (including two others from the University of Utah–Julia Moore and Stacey Overholt!). Posing, below, with some of my favorite people and scholars: Lisa Corrigan, Debbie Hawhee, and Mary Stuckey (left to right).Receiving the award from the president of NCA, Stephen Hartnett. For more information about the James…
Madison kept smiling under a pile of articles. We caught Ben deep in concentration.Melissa displays one of our manuscript plans on poster board.At this point, we probably needed a break!Kourtney and Robin celebrate an “as seen on TV” prize–the Futzuki–while Madison tries to keep working.Kourtney making use of one of our “as seen on TV”…
At the beginning of this week, the Chemical Rhetoric Group met in Park City to work on two different group projects. We went through a huge amount of primary data and enjoyed our time in the orange-and-yellow-colored mountains. More photos to come! Madison and Ben sort, organize, and code. We flowed our progress. And we…
Last week I headed to the University of Cincinnati for the 2017 Rhetoric of Health and Medicine Symposium. I had the pleasure of finally meeting the amazing Lisa Meloncon (pictured above); who has overseen the symposium since its start in 2013; catching up with my friend and extremely smart former advisee Melissa Carrion (also pictured above);…
Professor Robert Asen gave the keynote address entitled, “Disavowing networks, affirming networks: Neoliberalism and its challenge to democratic deliberation.” The conference was held at Utah’s Snowbird Resort, which provided a beautiful setting to deliberate. A panel on “Trump in the network of ideological argument” was standing room only. Here, Professor James F. Klumpp introduces the…
http://2017.altaconference.org/ I can’t wait to see you there!!
Here Dr. Cara Finnegan–winner of the 2017 Rhetorical and Communication Theory Faculty Mentorship Award–is shown with some of her former students. From left: Jennifer Mercieca, Jennifer Jones Barbour, Robin Jensen, Cara Finnegan, Jiyeon Kang Billie Murray introduced Cara beautifully before presenting her with the award at NCA in Dallas. Dr. Finnegan’s advisees pose in 2005 with…
In 2016, I published my second book, Infertility: Tracing the History of a Transformative Term, with the Pennsylvania State University Press in the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric. This book demonstrates that, throughout the last century, the inability of women to conceive children has been explained by discrepant views: that…
