I
currently work an Associate Professor in the Department of
Communication & Media at Boise State University.
I have spent a decade examining how various vernacular
and official rhetorics reveal often overlooked
sense-making processes that people engage to live in an urban
environment. After fifteen years of
teaching rhetoric, critical-cultural communication, and persuasion
classes, I find my current interests to be in how history
constitutes both communication and knowledge, and the relationships
between structures of power and organizing have led to meaningful
interactions with language learning, difference matters, and
sustainability initiatives across diverse groups and in
innovative spaces. I look forward to continuing to help others advance
their knowledge and expertise in various ways in my future.I regularly teach an array of upper- and lower-division and graduate-level courses. I held a Visiting Assistant Professor position for two years at Denison University from 2007-09 before arriving at Boise State and served as both a Graduate Teaching Assistant and Lead Graduate Teacher at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 2002-07. I have additionally spent six months as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark in 2018. For more information about my teaching philosophy and specific courses I teach, please click on the "Teaching" link at the bottom of the page.
I have served in various capacities to support my department, college, and university including Chair of the Faculty Senate Diversity Committee, liaison to the Cultural & Ethnic Diversity Board, Chair of the Communication Department Curriculum Committee, PI on a Boise State University Arts & Humanities Institute grant supporting an Interdisciplinary Research Community on "Translating Sustainability," and have experience working in an interdisciplinary teaching partnership with a colleague in the Urban Studies & Community Planning program. I've also worked closely with the development and growth of general education requirements at both Denison University and Boise State University around the Communication Across the Disciplines (CXC) initiative. I have also served as an Advisor and/or Committee member for undergraduate Honors students (at Boise State and Dension), undergraduate senior Fellows (at Denison), and Master's level graduate students at Boise State.
My most recent work has developed in three areas:
(1) supporting the growth and development of inclusive excellence work across campus, especially focusing on the role of critical pedagogy in programming support for first generation and under-represented students in addition to how language acquisition plays a role in communication and cultural competencies (I completed my 120-hour TESOL Certification in May 2020);
(2) encouraging and contributing to urban communication research, especially focusing on the roles of qualitative and content analysis methods, rhetorical fieldwork, and critical pedagogy in studying the role of public spaces and places in perceptions of a city's (lack of) success as a thriving metropolis; and
(3) supporting and contributing to work aimed at translating technical, scientific, and legal communication across both terms/language but also cultural understandings, incentives, and perceptions of community as a way to reconsider possibilities for sustainable practices in everyday life.
My ongoing research combines qualitative and rhetorical methods of data collection and analysis of symbolic communication in and about
(1) (inter)cultural communication within communities of teaching and learning;
(2) cities and their interconnected environments and communities; and
(3) the ways that scientific data is (re)presented to communities in ways that (un)successfully influences the practices that such data reporting calls forth.
My work across these areas looks at how official and vernacular rhetorics make sense of
(1) the aims, goals, processes, and outcomes of teaching and learning;
(2) public spaces and places are engaged in successful and sustainable urban planning as well as discussions imagining, creating, and managing a city's future in practice; and
(3) tensions that emerge between, among, and within various communities that must necessarily engage in sustainability discourses aimed at helping us live together with our environment into a more certain future.
My mixed-methods approach to research is both informed by what is happening in the world according to the diverse people who engage it while enabling varied foci, ways of speaking, displaying, and identifying problems and solutions that both align and diverge among the various peoples associated with any public arena. I have studied, engaged, and reviewed research utilizing various types of qualitative interpretive and critical rhetorical methods over the course of my career and use these as a way to draw our attention to problems and solutions in ways that seek to help us continually be inspired to work together to create the change that is needed to move toward a sustainable future--of teaching and learning, of city living, and in the ways that we practice sustainability in everyday life.
I have published a variety of peer reviewed academic journal articles and academic book chapters in addition to public scholarship outlets and applied teaching and research opportunities into my communities beyond campus. For more information, please click on the "Research" link below or view my most up-to-date CV (also linked below). Most recently, I have a co-edited and contributed to a volume of collected urban communication scholarship that has been accepted for publication in 2021 (Urban Communication Reader IV: Cities as Communicative Change Agents, Peter Lang Publishing) as well as contributed to a volume of scholarship examining the tensions that emerge when many differet voices must speak together, which is also scheduled for publication in 2021 (Speaking with One Voice: Multivocality and Univocality in Organizing, Routledge).
Please see the following links for more information: