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This essay explores public discourses about age-related infertility. These discourses serve as compelling texts that illustrate feminist tendencies to rely on narrative resources to recount events, depict characters, suggest causes for events, and represent the passage of time. Through a post-structural feminist reading, we explore discursive moves through which ARI was storied in mainstream outlets to shed light on relationships among symbols, power, knowledge, reproductive rights, and work-family issues. We then illustrate the general failure of these personal stories to politicize the socio-historical, institutional, and material nature of reproductive choices. We conclude by noting the limits of narratives as rhetorical resources in social movements and public health initiatives when attention does not extend beyond individual expressions to redress forces that shape and constrain human agency. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explored the cultured and gendered nature of managerial disagreements by examining how upper level co-managers in Sino-American joint ventures described conflicts they had experienced with their culturally different counterparts. We argued that such conflicts are one of the routine, situational accomplishments of everyday organizing practices that (re)construct cultures and masculinities. We examined tensions that arise in the management of joint ventures, the ways in which managerial masculinity emerged both similarly and differently across cultural groups, and ways in which culturally different enactments of managerial masculinity contributed to conflictual interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health care practitioners come to understand their professional roles through socialization processes. This project investigates messages medical students receive through interactions with two important socializing agents: standardized patients and virtual patients. Through in-depth interviews with allopathic (M.D.) students, osteopathic (D.O.) students, and key administrators at both medical schools as well as an analysis of rhetorical artifacts about the formal curricula at both schools, we explored the ideological aspects of medical instruction as constituted and reinforced, perhaps subtly, covertly, and even inadvertently, through the pedagogical practices of using standardized and virtual patients. Our results highlight how these medical students perceive standardized and virtual patient interactions as an opportunity to "play doctor in a safe environment," and confront a primary tension they will face in enacting their professional roles--being cost effective and efficient while also treating "patients as people." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second topic of discussion (concretized as a position paper), panelists articulate ways in which communication curriculum at Jesuit institutions have been designed to achieve social impact. Erika Kirby discusses Creighton's capstone Communication and Community that was designed to meet the curricular objective of "societal preparation" by focusing on communicating to eliminate social "isms." She illustrates how when social impact is an objective for students, places in the curriculum must be created for them to achieve the objective. As a second example of curriculum, Bren Ortega Murphy articulates the "promise" to "prepare people to lead extraordinary lives" in Loyola Chicago's School of Communication as a commitment to educating students toward social impact. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]