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December 2012 Volume: 31, #2

University of Minnesota
Department of Communication Studies
225 Ford Hall
224 Church Street SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Editors: Beatrice Dehler, Ronald W. Greene, (graduate students) Matthew Bost & Allison Page

Notes from the chair:

I have completed my first semester as the Interim Chair of the Department of Communication Studies. As of today, the department is still standing. This past semester, the department supported the transfer of Mark Pedelty's and Catherine Squires' tenure home from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication (SJMC) to the Department of Communication Studies. After consultation with Associate Dean Michal Kobialka and Al Tims in SJMC, Dean Parente approved the move. On July 1, 2013, Mark and Catherine will officially join our department. Along with Annie Hill, who joined us an Assistant Professor this year after a successful post-doc last year, I hope everyone will get an opportunity to meet our new faculty and welcome them to the department. On a personal note, I am happy to report that the Critical and Cultural Studies Division of NCA awarded me their Distinguished Scholar Award this past November.

Ronald Walter Greene

National Communication Association Conference

Communication Studies honored Bea Dehler at a department-sponsored reception held at the NCA conference on Friday, 16 November. About 75 people celebrated Bea's contributions to the department on the occasion of her fortieth year working with us. Bea, who was accompanied by her niece, Amanda, was asked to give a brief speech reflecting on her tenure in the department. We publish it here for those unable to attend the reception.

"First, I want to thank past and present department chairs Ed Schiappa and Ron Greene for coming up with the idea that I attend this year's NCA celebrating my 40+ years of service in the Department of Communication Studies.

Second, I want to thank two of our fine Ph.D. graduate students—Shelby Bell and Allison Prasch—for planning this wonderful party. I think it is nice to know that the tradition of a "Minnesota Party" at NCA conferences can happen without my help.

Third, I want to thank my lovely niece Amanda Suchy, a recent grad from St. Benedict and St. John's University who now works at the U of MN in the Psychology Department, for agreeing to join me at this party and represent my first family, which includes my brothers and sisters, their spouses, my nieces and nephews, and great nieces and nephews.

I think it is fair to say that after working in the department for 40+ years, you are my second family. Professor Robert Scott and Joan Lund hired me. On my first day of work with a start time of 8:00 a.m., at 8:01 Professor Scott, with a used manila folder in his hand, rolled a chair next to me and handed over about 40 hand-written pages of an article he wanted typed using an old red electric typewriter—five carbons with footnotes on the bottom of each page for the Quarterly Journal of Speech. Coming from Hibbing, MN, I never heard of that magazine before! I worked on that article for about a week and finally Joan finished it for me. Sadly, neither of them are here with us but it because of those two and their willingness to hire me that I am here today.

The late Professor Ernest Bormann always talked about the university operating in a 10-year cycle. New leadership, new plans, and finally, new implementation that amazingly didn't work well. By this time, 10 years has passed and it is now time to try again.

I am now on my 5th 10-year cycle and thanks to the leadership of Professors Robert Scott, Donald Browne, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Edward Schiappa, and now Ron Greene, the department remains strong and committed to the College of Liberal Arts and the University of Minnesota. We can and will endure! Unless I won the Powerball drawing of approximately $180 million dollars last Wednesday night (yes I did buy a ticket), this event is not my retirement celebration. I continue to care about the budget, the class schedule, the department coffee pot, and the department's place in CLA. While my being in the department 40+ years says something about me, it also says a lot about you! Thank you!"

Bea Dehler
November 16, 2012

Senior Faculty

Rosita Albert
Presenter: Expanding our Community through Applied Peacebuilding Scholarship/Praxis:
Interactive Roundtable

Ronald Walter Greene
Respondent: Ecologies of Power: Rhetoric and the Practices of Personhood
Panel Chair: Fractured Media, Locative Media, Internet Memes and Collective Memory
Panel Chair: Communities of Struggle: Theorizing the Rhetorical History of the Left
Presenter: Advancing the Communication Discipline: Professional Development in Doctoral Education

Alan Gross
Panel Chair: Scientists, Citizens, and Cyberspace: Expanding Scientific and Public Engagement in the Digital Age

Angela "Annie" Hill
Paper: "Slutwalk: Sexual Politics and the Perils of Reclaiming a Name"

Ascan Koerner
(with Naomi Kagawa)
Paper: "Empathic Accuracy as a Reason Why Some Families Have their Conversation more Topically Coherent than Others"
Presenter: Honoring Mary Anne Fitzpatrick, Winner of the 2012 Mark L. Knapp Award in Interpersonal Communication

Arthur Walzer
Paper: "Did Aristotle Write the Rhetoric? And Does it Matter?

Graduate Students

Sky Anderson, Paper
"Surgeries, Sex, and Suckers: Grey's Anatomy and an Experiment in Distinguishing the 'Who' of Taste"

Shelby Bell, Paper
"Silence as Conversational Implicature: A Study of Rhetorical Silence in Berghuis v. Thompkins"

Emily Berg Paup, Chair
International Rhetorics of Citizenship Panel

Matthew Wesley Bost, Papers
"Recalcitrant Bodies: Action and Motion as Limits to Burke's Materialism"
"'Nous Sommes en Marche': Agency and Representation in the May 1968 Protests in France"

Wesley D. Hansen, Paper
"Communicating Gaydar: Articulating Impression Formation and Nonverbal Behavior of Men"

Heather Hayes, Papers
"Dying for (COMM)unity: Rhetoricity, Discourse, and Suicide Attack" "Discourse of Control: Rationalities of Governance and Citizenship in a Post 9/11 Landscape"

Melody Hoffman and Allyson Shaffer, Paper
"(Dis)placing Disney in the Mall of America: A Medley"

Mia Fischer, Paper
"Commemorating 9/11 NFL-Style: Insights into America's Culture of Militarism"

Mark Martinez, Paper
"A Productive Eye for Information: Visual Analytics as a New Field of Knowledge, Biopolitical Communication, and Technique of Observation"

Kaitlyn Patia, Paper
"Waging Peace: The Rhetorical Inheritance and Legacy of the Dulles Doctrine in U.S. Foreign Policy"

Allison Prasch, Paper
"The 'Fireside Chat' that Wasn't: Franklin D. Roosevelt's Shift to War Rhetoric" Presenter: "Unite in Sisterhood": Perspectives on Women's Rights and Female Political Participation in the Global Community

Emma Kate Ranachan, Paper
"Inviting the Multitude: Hospitality and the Possibility of Living-in-Common"

Dana Schowalter, Papers
"10,000 Women Save the Bottom Line: Philanthrocapitalism and the Corporate Media Environment"
"A Woman's Nation? News Discourse, Enterprise Culture, and Postfeminist Citizenship"
Respondent: Crime and Punishment, Fear and Loathing: Autoethnography and Challenges to Identity

Teaching Faculty

Simon Calder, Paper
"What are the Claims and Constraints of the Novel as a Medium for the Communication of an Ethics"

Margaret Kunde, Paper
"The Nation's First Presidents and Religious Discourse: A Message in Form"

Other Conference Activities

Senior Faculty

Angela Hill attended the Midwest Law and Society Retreat at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on September 21-22, 2012. She also participated in the Re-Imagining Blackness Community Roundtable, hosted by the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota on December 14, 2012.

Laurie Ouellette presented her research on reality television and the "problem" of teenage pregnancy to the University of Minnesota's Gender, Sexuality, Power, and Politics Colloquium in September and delivered the first inaugural Annual Lecture in the Interdisciplinary Social Thought Program at Penn State in November.

Mark Pedelty produced and directed the Ecomusicology Listening Room (ELR) from Oct. 31 through November 4 in New Orleans. The ELR (ecosong.org) is a set of physical and virtual installations matching sound and visual compositions, each designed to inspire dialogue around a question concerning the role of sound in ecosystems. The ELR is sponsored by the American Musicological Society (AMS) and Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) and funded by University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment (IonE). Dr. Pedelty will be presenting a related talk at the Frontiers in Environment series at the IonE on Wednesday, February 27, at noon and the ELR exhibits will be on display throughout March at the IonE on the St. Paul campus.

Dr. Pedelty was also invited to speak at Wesleyan University's Shasha Conference on November 9, where he presented a talk on the topic of Public Music, Public Lands: Music as Environmental Communication. The other invited speakers included Anthony Seeger, Professor Emeritus in Ethnomusicology at UCLA and Executive Producer of the Smithsonian Folkways program and recordings, and Ghanian rapper "Blitz the Ambassador."

Graduate Students:

Jacqueline Arcy, Paper
"Ritual Citizenship in News Photographs of Osama Bin
Laden's Death." National Women's Studies Association. Oakland,
CA. (November 2012)

"Affective Blogging: Celebrating and Condemning Osama
Bin Laden's Death Online." Midwest Popular Culture Association.
Columbus, OH. (October 2012)

Daniel Hassoun, Paper and Roundtable Response
"Flattering Conflicts: Strategic Ambiguity and War Film Reception"
Midwest Popular Culture Association Conference, Columbus, OH. (October 2012)

"Television Ratings and Audience Measurement in the Digital Age"
Flow TV Conference, Austin, TX. (November 2012)

Mark Martinez, Paper
"Purposive Communicative Technologies Beyond Human Scale."
Society for Literature Science and Arts: Nonhuman Conference, Milwaukee, WI. (September 2012)

Allison Page, Paper
"Making a Change: Race, Enterprise, and Neoliberal Governmentality on From G's to Gents."
American Studies Association Conference, San Juan, Puerto Rico. (November 2012)

Other Department Activities

Senior Faculty:

Laurie Ouellette's edited book, The Media Studies Reader, was recently published by Routledge.

Laurie Ouellette also published a chapter in the collection Commodity Activism, edited by Sarah Banet-Weiser and Roopali Mukherjee, and an article on the media celebrity of Sarah Palin in the August issue of Cinema Journal.

Mary Vavrus' article "Marketing Militarism to Moms: News and Branding after September 11" will be published as a chapter in Volume 3 (Sharon Mazzarella, editor) of The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies (Angharad Valdivia, general editor), Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

Mary Vavrus' article "Lifetime's Army or I Married the Media-Military-Industrial Complex" will be published in Women's Studies in Communication, 36 (1).

Art Walzer's article "Parrhēsia, Foucault and the Classical Rhetorical Tradition" will be published in the Winter Issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

Graduate Students:

Mia Fischer's book review, "September 11 and America's Sporting Nation," will be published in a 2013 issue of Cultural Studies.

Daniel Hassoun's article "Tracing Attentions: Toward an Analysis of Simultaneous Media Use" was accepted for publication in Television and New Media.

Daniel Hassoun's book review of Will Brooker's Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman was accepted for publication in The Journal of Popular Culture.

Allison Page's book review of Jodi Melamed's Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism was published in the journal DarkMatter in September 2012.

Dana Schowalter's article "Silencing The Shriver Report: Postfeminist Citizenship and News Discourse" was published in The Communication Review, 15:3, 218-231.

Raechel Tiffe was elected as Secretary of the NCA Caucus on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Concerns.

Raechel Tiffe's article "Voice of a Generation?: The Question of Authenticity in HBO's Girls" will be published on In Media Res in January 2013.

Teaching Faculty

Louis Porter II was awarded a doctorate after successfully defending his dissertation, "Creating Cross-cultural Christian Community: An Instrumental Case Study" in August at the College of Education, Leadership & Counseling, University of St. Thomas.

Louis Porter II has been accepted to participate in the University of Minnesota's 2012-13 Internationalizing Teaching and Learning (ITL) Cohort Program sponsored by the Global Programs & Strategy (GPS) Alliance, the Center for Teaching and Learning, Instructional Development Services (UMD), and the Office of Information Technology. Faculty and instructors from all 5 U of M campuses— Crookston, Duluth, Morris, Rochester and Twin Cities—will be in the ITL Cohort Program and represent a wide range of disciplines.

Jeremy Rose has recorded a 57-minute CD of original music, performed on acoustic, electric and 12-string guitars, bass, and keyboards, called "Footprints on the Wall."

Recent Ph.D. Degrees

"Let's Talk about Sex: How Family Communication Patterns and Family Sexual Communication Impact Adolescents' and Emerging Adults' Sexual Outcomes"
Alyssa M. Isaacs
Adviser: Dr. Ascan Koerner

"'A New Woman in Old Fashioned Times': Party Women and the Rhetorical Foundations of Political Womanhood"
Emily Berg Paup
Adviser: Dr. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell

"Serving, Informing and Inspiring Today's Female Athlete and Fan Postfeminist Neoliberal Discourse: A Critical Media Analysis of ESPNw"
Sarah Wolter
Adviser: Dr. Mary Vavrus

Debate Tidbits

The Minnesota Debate Team's season is at its midway point, and already includes a number of noteworthy accomplishments. The squad has hosted two high school debate tournaments, sponsored well-attended watch parties for each of the presidential and vice presidential debates, and conducted a public debate for CLA's First Year Experience program. The squad also saw considerable competitive success, winning the regional opener and advancing teams to the elimination rounds of every national NDT/CEDA tournament of the fall semester. The Gopher team of Cody Crunkilton (CLA Jr., Stevens Point WI) and Miranda Ehrlich (CLA So., Plymouth, MN) were ranked as the 18th best individual team in the country in the latest Coaches' Poll. The squad will resume competition over the winter break as it sends teams to highly competitive swing tournaments in both California and Texas before it returns to host the Minnesota State High School League's State Championship DebateTournament over MLK weekend.

Alumni

Beth Bonnstetter (Ph.D. 2008) recently published "The Legacy of Mystery Science Theater 3000: Text, Textual Production, Paracinema, and Media Literacy" in the Journal of Popular Film & Television. 40.2 (2012): 94-105.

Bonnie Dow (Ph.D. 1990) received the 2012 Francine Merritt Award for outstanding contributions to the lives of women in communication from the NCA Women's Caucus. Thomas Johnson (Ph.D. 2010) accepted a tenure-track position at Luther College in fall of 2013.

Sarah Lechowich has accepted a part-time teaching position at North Hennepin Community College. This spring she will teach three communication studies classes while continuing her work as a freelance social media consultant for local non-profit & for profit organizations.

Eunkyong (Esther) Lee Yook (Ph.D. 1996), in her attempt to overcome her empty-nest syndrome, published her second book, Communication Centers and Across the Curriculum Programs in Higher Education, co-edited with Wendy Atkins Sayre, in February 2012. She is currently working on her third book, The Model Minority in U.S. Academia.

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Thank you for your “bits and pieces” for COMMPOSTING. Please continue to send news to Bea Dehler at dehle001@umn.edu Next edition: June 2013.