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December 2011 Volume: 30, #2

National Communication Association Edition

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

Editor: Beatrice Dehler
Secretary: Edward Schiappa

 

David Tucker, Mary Vavrus, and Jackie Arcy interact with a prospective graduate student at the Graduate Program Open House on November 17th at the National Communication Association’s conference in New Orleans.

Senior Faculty

Rosita Albert
Paper: “Ameliorating and Preventing Ethnic Conflict, and Creating a Culture of Peace: A Bold Proposal.”

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell
Presenter: Connections: Women’s Voices, Past and Present Program

Ronald Walter Greene
Paper: “The Sabido Method: Entertainment-Education & the Cultural Labor of Bio-Political Governance.”
Respondent: Resisting Democracy: Voicing the Problems and Possibilities with Publics
Respondent: The Voice of Conservatism: Understanding Contemporary Conservative Discourses of Power and Resistance within the Tea Party Movement

Angela Hill
Paper: “Spoken For: The Univocality of Prostitution Policy Debates in Great Britain.”

Susanne Jones
Paper: “The Nature of Supportive Listening III: Do Relational Affiliation, Closeness, and Quality mediate the Relationship between Supportive Communication and Listening?”
Respondent: Communicating with Empathy and Affection

Gilbert Rodman
Panel Chair: We Don’t Want Too Much Freedom, Now:
The Extremes from Censorship to Intellectual Piracy

Mary Vavrus
Respondent: Deconstructing the Boob Tube: Giving Voice of Representations of Women on the Margins

Arthur Walzer
Panel Chair: Seminar: Civic Rhetorics: Definitions, Traditions, and Contemporary Challenges
Respondent: Dewey, Cheatem & Howe: Lies, Scandals, and Political Rhetoric
Respondent: Echoes of Immanuel Kant; Rhetoric’s Kantian Inheritance

Graduate Students

Emily Berg
Paper: “Mary Yellin’: Mary Elizabeth Lease and a Feminized Populist Politic.”
Round Table Participant: Connections: Women's Voices, Past and Present

Carolina Branson
Panel Chair: Exposing Critical/Cultural Voices in the Field
Paper: “Disciplinarity, the Family, and the State: Understanding Purity Balls as Cultural Technologies.”
Paper: “Negotiating Health Information via Interactivity: Web MD, Marketing and Communal Collaboration.”

Matthew Bost
Paper: “Spectators in France: Historical Subjectivity and Audience in Marx’s Paris Commune Speech.”
Paper: “Crafting a ‘New Language’: Reflections on Marx’s Writing as Political Style.”

Erin Cole
Paper: “Digitally-Mediated Craft Economies and the Performance of Authenticity.”

Diane Cormany
Paper: “Chris Farrell, NPR, and Habitus: The Consumer after the Great Recession.”

Liora Elias
Paper: “Ellen DeGeneres & Rachel Maddow: An Inquiry into Performances of Female Masculinity on Mainstream Television.”
Paper: “Please be okay with this:
Exploring Contemporary Coming Out Moments on Network Television.”

Mia Fisher
“‘Tell Me What Company thou Keepest, and I’ll Tell Thee What Thou Art’ – Homophilious Relationships on Facebook.”

Heather Hayes
Paper: “Egypt and the Moment of Middle East Resistance: Delinking, Heterotopia, and the Possibilities for Revival of a Revolutionary Voice.”
Paper: “A Rhetoric of Moving Forward with the Arab World? Barack Obama’s Voice in Cairo.”
Paper: “Assessing the Voice of College Voters in Election 2008: The Effect of Race and Sex on Perceptions of Candidate Credibility.”

Rebecca Jurisz
Paper: “The First Ladies’ ‘Pillow Sphere’ of Governance:
Femininity, Intimacy and Legitimacy in the White House.”

Sarah Lechowich
Paper: “Implications of Family Communication patterns and Computer Mediated Communication on Perceived Parental Support”

Helen Morgan Parmett
Paper: “Community/Common: Traversing the Aporia between Jean Luc Nancy’s and
Antonio Negri’s (Un)Common Ontologies.”
(Top Four Papers in Philosophy of Communication Division)
Paper: “Tremé’s Media Spaces: Television, Race, and Neighborhood in the Age of Neoliberalism.”
Paper: “’The Brad Pitt Houses’: Celebrity Brands and the Production of Neighborhood Space.”

Katilyn Patia
Paper: “Speaking of space: Integrating Spatial and Rhetorical Movement.”

Allison Prasch
Roundtable Presenter: “Global Voices and Women’s Human Rights: Gender, Culture, and Rhetorical Possibilities for Women Leaders.”
Paper: “Feminine Voices in a ‘Triple-Bind’: Female Interpretations of ‘Mad Men’ Women.”

Dana Schowalter
Paper: “Sarah Palin’s America: Mythological Formations and the American Dream.”
Paper: “Silencing Discussions of Institutionalized Racism and Sexism: Postfeminism, Postracism, and the Supreme Court Nomination of Sonia Sotomayor.”

Allyson Shaffer
Paper: “How to Become A Celebrity, Whether You Want to or Not: The Celebritizing Spaces of the Sims 3 Late Night.”

Shannon Stevens
Paper: “The Epideictic Nature of the ‘End of War’ Speech: Hirohito and Truman.”
(Top Student Paper)
Paper: “Whedon’s Women”.

Raechel Tiffe
Paper: “In the Name of Queer Love 4: The Limits of Decorum and Anger.”
Paper: “Clash of the Voices: Warfare in the Media’s Political Choir.”

Julie Wilson
Paper: “The Situation in Jersey Shore: Celebrity, Space, and the New Television Economy.”
(with Ishita Sinnha Roy)

Sarah Wolter
Paper: “Teen Mom and ‘New Momism’.”
Short Course Facilitator: “Developing a voice in a semester-long practicum in citizenship.”

Other Conference Activities

Liora Elias
Paper: “Reading The Kids Are All Right through Questions of Race, Family, Desire & Futurity”
Midwest Pop Culture Association; Milwaukee, WI; October 2011

Daniel Hassoun
Paper: “God Was (Rightly) Wrong: Bigger Than Life and Hollywood’s Interpretive Flexibility”
Midwest Pop Culture Association; Milwaukee, WI; October 2011

Daniel Hassoun
Paper: “Understanding Wandering Attentions in Film and Comic Narration”
Comic Book Rises Symposium; Indiana University, Bloomington; October 2011

Angela Hill
Panel Chair: Social Movements and Queer Resistance
(Contingent Belongings: Queer Reflections on Race, Space, and the State)
University of Minnesota, September 2011

Melody Hoffmann
Paper: “Pedal pushers in urban spaces: how online technology works to get women on bicycles”
Girls & Women in Sport and Physical Activity Conference, November 2011: Creating Change
(Associated with the University of Minnesota Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport)
Allison Prasch
Media Review: “Pray the Devil Back to Hell: An Analysis”
34th Annual Conference of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language and Gender
Evanston, IL; October 2011

Sarah Wolter
Public Discourse Panel: A model for teaching public speaking, critical thinking, and citizenship (selected as one of three showcase panels sent on to the 2011 Central States Communication Association Conference) Communication and Theater Association of Minnesota Conference
Bloomington, MN; September 2011

Sarah Wolter
Poster: Semiotic analysis of messages about physical activity and sport in adolescent magazines
Girls & Women in Sport and Physical Activity Conference, November 2011: Creating Change
(Associated with the University of Minnesota Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport)

Other Department Activities

Beatrice Dehler (COMMPOST Editor and department secretary) has a self-published book entitled Lessons Learned: A Family and Their Ten Year Journey with Alzheimer’s Disease written by Daughter #2 (herself) now available at St. Patrick’s Guild Bookstore, St. Paul, MN or on their website at www.stpatricksguild.com Since September 1, 2011 almost 1,000 books have been sold or distributed and with each sale $1.00 goes to support Alzheimer’s Disease research.

Daniel Hassoun’s (graduate student) article, “Costly Attentions: Governing the Media Multitasker” has been accepted for publication in a forthcoming edition of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.

Angela Hill (Postdoctoral Associate) was invited and participated in “Conversations with the Provost” for new faculty in September 2011. She was also invited to present at a Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies seminar to speak with graduate students about writing the dissertation.

The first season of the webseries “Forsythia” is written, produced, and directed by teaching faculty Peter Gregg & Mark Neuman-Scott and launched on the Forsythia website. The series was shot over four weeks the summer of 2010 with six of our former students as crew. The Pioneer Press ran an article about the series. This past summer Peter and Mark recorded the second season.

Part of an article written by Laura Jacobi (teaching faculty) entitled “Through the Eyes of the Nurse: spirituality and Well Being in Healthcare: was cited in a BBC Radio program called “A Spiritual Society” which aired on November 20, 2011.

Jodi Janati (teaching faculty) self-published the book Protect Yourself from Control Dramas.

Ryo Kanno (graduate student) attended the 2nd Annual Conference of the Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature Department at the University of Minnesota October 14-15, 2011.

John Nordin (teaching faculty) has self-published a book of poetry, Winter Quarters, which is available from Amazon.com.

Laurie Ouellette (faculty) presented the paper “It’s not TV, it’s Birth Control: Reality Television and the ‘Problem’ of Teenage Pregnancy” at University College Dublin’s Department of Film and Media Studies (October) and at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California (November).

In fall 2011 Kaitlyn Patia (graduate student) had a book review published in Rhetoric and Public Affairs. (Jeremy Engels, Enemyship (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010).

In September 2011 Dana Schowalter (graduate student) published the article “Silencing Feminist Interventions in News: The Future of Selling Television” in Media Report to Women.

Amy Sheldon (faculty) gave a keynote address and was a discussant at an International Conference on Marginalization Processes. The conference-as-workshop took place at Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden, October 17-19. While at the Universit,y she consulted with faculty and presented her research to a class. The conference was sponsored by the Swedish Research Council.

Amy Sheldon (faculty) received a grant from the Interdisciplinary Studies in Writing at the University of Minnesota to develop a course in Storytelling in Conversation. She is teaching the topic in a writing intensive Communication Studies first year seminar this semester. The students are analyzing conversational stories from their own conversations, which they video recorded with University equipment. They are understanding stories as multimodal communication events involving precise synchronization of the linguistic-verbal dimension with the visual-somatic (i.e. body engagement, gesture) dimensions. The work on the grant also involves rethinking and expanding writing so that multimodal communicative events can be effectively represented in a digital medium that allows print, video, and audio to be fully integrated. With this grant, Amy is developing an approach to writing in a digital environment that goes beyond print to represent discourse as the highly synchronized multimodal, multidimensional activity it actually is.

Recent Ph.D. Degrees

“Wall of Me: Facebook Self-Disclosure, Partner Responsiveness and
Consequences for Intimacy Relationships”
Linda Freeman
Adviser: Ascan Koerner

“Making News Popular: Mobilizing U.S. News Audiences from the 1970s into the Digital Age”
Anthony Nadler
Adviser: Mary Vavrus

“Idols of Goodwill: Caring Stars and the Making of Global Citizens”
Julie Wilson
Adviser: Laurie Ouellette

Recent or Pending M.A. Degrees

“The Economics of Labor and Authenticity in Minnesota Art Pottery.”
Erin Cole
Adviser: Laurie Ouellette

“Coachella s Pilgrimage Site: Festival Fans and the Co-Production of Place.”
Diane Cormany
Adviser: Gilbert Rodman

“Making a Change: Race, Enterprise, and Neoliberal Governmentality on From G’s to Gents.”
Allison Page
Adviser: Laurie Ouellette

“‘Crossing the Border of Fear’: Exploring Imitation, Imagination, and Affect in the Citizenship Enactment of Undocumented Immigrant Youth.”
Kaitlyn Patia
Adviser: Karlyn Kohrs Campbell

Alumni

Elaine Shapiro (Ph.D. 1992) published the book,  Reading the Bible: Transforming Conflict by Orbis Books. The authors synthesize biblical, cultural, literary and social scientific viewpoints to explore contemporary ideas about conflict. Each chapter first uses the lens of biblical studies to deconstruct a story. Next, a communication lens is applied using the Bible stories as case studies. Both the Hebrew bible and the New Testament provide the stimuli for the exploration of conflict.
Robert Veninga (Ph.D. 1972) had the lead article “Caring for Ourselves as We Care for Others: the Psychology of Resilience” in the November 2011 edition of Vital Speeches.

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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: May 2012.