Communications
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Recent Submissions
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The Political Logic of the Radical Right Media Sphere in the United States
Democracy in America is threatened by an increased level of false information circulating through online media networks. Previous research has found that radical right media such as Fox News and Breitbart are the principal ... -
Listening Across Difference: Mapping StoryCorps’ Affective Archives
This dissertation explores the affective potential of telling and listening to stories of racialized trauma and resistance in an equity-focused digital storytelling project. I investigate tensions that arise when testimonials ... -
Moving Forward Together: Partisans’ Motivations for Seeking Out Cross-partisan Contact
Affective polarization in American politics is having a detrimental effect on our ability to function as a society, but intergroup contact between people with different political views has the potential to reduce some of ... -
Rhetoric and Ethics of Free Speech Discourse on Gab
Gab is a social media platform that brands itself as a champion of free speech. Users engage in a variety of extremist speech, including arguments for free speech absolutism. I argue that if free speech arguments on Gab ... -
Embodying Sisterhood: Community Politics of Black Cisgender and Transgender Womanhood
Embodying Sisterhood: Community Politics of Black Cisgender and Transgender Womanhood is an interdisciplinary project originating from my intellectual activism in the service of social justice to increase the chances of ... -
Challenges and Adaptations to Technological Change in Online Communities
Management of technological change in organizations is one of the most enduring topics in the literature on computer-supported cooperative work. The successful navigation of technological change is both more challenging ... -
Migrants’ Reported Use of Communication Behaviors that Enact Family across Distance
This study investigates reported migrant family communication. It starts by identifying the four key characteristics that combine to distinguish migrant families from other family types: 1) the condition of distance between ... -
Tinder-ing Desire: The Circuit of Culture, Gamified Dating and Creating Desirable Selves
This dissertation starts at intersection of race, gender, and technology, all of which will be discussed in depth throughout this project, and the fluid state of being constituted and being undone by one another. It is in ... -
Reclaiming publicness in the face of sexual assault: Social media, disclosure, and visibility
In recent years, social media have supported a host of viral campaigns aiming to increase awareness of, accountability for, and social justice around sexual assault (e.g., Maas, McCauley, Bonomi, & Leija, 2018; Provenzano, ... -
Production Misalignment: a Threat to Public Knowledge
On Wikipedia, when a high-interest topic is poorly-covered—either it is incomplete or contains inaccurate information—public knowledge is threatened. Contributors on Wikipedia are volunteers: they’re not assigned to track ... -
Handmade Future: A Field-based Inquiry of Innovation through Making and Craft
This project analyzes the impact of mediated discourse on the skills, materials, and tools of innovation through a multi-method, three-part study of “making” practices— a growing method of Do-It-Yourself technology design ... -
Expert Advocacy: The Public Address of Scientists in a Post-Truth Society
In this dissertation, using classical and contemporary rhetorical theory I examine the public advocacy efforts of American scientists as they respond to perceived threats by elected officials on the integrity of science ... -
Stand, Speak, Act: Using the Theory of Planned Behavior to evaluate a sexual assault bystander intervention campaign on a tri-campus university
In response to alarmingly high rates of sexual assault on college campuses, the U.S. government has called on universities to help prevent sexual assault through various programs, trainings, and campaigns. Bystander ... -
Digital Media and Presidential Campaigning in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Study of the 2016 Election in Ghana
The dissertation is a study of how presidential campaigns in new democracies in Sub-Saharan Africa use digital media to organize their teams and mobilize voters, with a focus on the 2016 presidential election in Ghana. ... -
Data science of the social: How the practice is responding to ethical crisis and spreading across sectors
This dissertation is based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork within the Data Science Environment at the University of Washington. Employing a practice-based approach, it focuses on two processes involved in "data ... -
The Rhetoric of Bitcoin: Money, Politics, and the Construction of Blockchain Communities
The rise of Bitcoin and related digital currencies has been accompanied by a proliferation of discourse about these technologies, including debates about their value and status as forms of money. This dissertation examines ... -
Constructing Journalism Practice Between the Global and the Local: Lessons From the Rwandan Journalism Field
This dissertation shows how the journalism field in Rwanda is constructed, including how journalists learn their social role, how they decide what news they will publish, and what factors enable some journalists to produce ... -
Manufacturing Consensus: Computational Propaganda and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
This dissertation is an investigation of the ways three political actor groups used and interacted with bots and computational propaganda during the 2016 Presidential Election in the United States of America: political ... -
Creativity Readiness in Crisis Communications: How Crisis Communicators’ Ability to be Creative is Impacted at the Individual, Work Team, and Organizational Levels
In recent years, the global environment in which modern organizations operate has been dominated by a 24-hour news cycle, rapid information flows, demanding increased sensitivities to diverse populations, and intense ... -
Building Recovery Capital: The Role of Cooperative Behavior in a Community Support Institution
Contemporary scholars and addiction professionals agree that person- and community-centered approaches to recovery from substance misuse are most effective in establishing sustainable change. Recovery Capital is one concept ...