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Social media has figured prominently in two literatures in recent years: the rise of authoritarian populism and the desirability of publicly engaged scholarship. This paper connects these two usual...

This article seeks to inform counselors, counseling students, and counselor educators about the professional applications of podcasting. It discusses the historical development and recent prolifera...

Field philosophy is both a collaborative practice of engaged scholarship and a theory of knowledge that contrasts with the model of disciplinary knowledge production. I briefly describe the origins...

Universities can foster inclusive innovation by establishing a learning and innovation ecology that assists students to pioneer new ways of addressing societal challenges. The paper examines learni...

We report here on a multifaceted body of research on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), chemicals that have become a well-known group of ‘emerging contaminants’ in recent years. Our PFAS Project team of over 10 researchers – faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates – has been working since 2015 to study the extent and health effects of PFAS contamination through a broad model of engaged public sociology. Our model of research combines organic public sociology with elements of community-based participatory research, a related but distinct research form most widely used in the environmental health sciences. Based on long-term, place-based relationships, our engaged public sociology has led to numerous academic, regulatory, and social movement effects. We argue that this form of engaged, intervention-oriented public sociology is appropriate and beneficial for research in many areas of environmental sociology given the social and ecological stakes in the current moment. Engaged public sociology involves collaborative, reflexive research with broadly-conceived communities or publics. It facilitates the creation of previously undone science by addressing research topics of interest to community members, and allows researchers to directly contribute to environmental and social justice movements by acting as reflexive, observant participants.

In this article I consider the relationship between socially engaged scholarship and political science. I argue that political science as a discipline is fundamentally committed to social engagemen...

Health Communication launched the "Defining Moments" feature of the journal in 2009, including essays that showcase the social and material power of storytelling. Over the past 10 years, essays have enlarged academic conventions and offered diverse entry points for refiguring the experience of living well in the midst of inescapable illness, trauma, and disability. Health Communication builds on this legacy by introducing a podcast by the same name. In this essay, I position podcasting as embodied and engaged scholarship that connects health communication scholars, physicians and other care providers, patients and families, and general publics interested in illness and healthcare, vulnerability and well-being.

This article builds on the concept of the ‘Development University’ and draws on findings from previous studies by the author on the transformation pathway and a university-coordinated intermediary platform at the University of Fort Hare. The article places the university at the centre of the development of an innovation ecosystem to facilitate the development of ecosystem platform architectures for engaged scholarship projects and their implementation for the benefit of local communities. The platform ecosystem design framework derived in this article approaches the analysis from three levels: (1) Contextual considerations and design requirements through a development pathway framework; (2) distinguishing between top-down creation of institutional mechanisms and the emergence of bottom-up engaged scholarship activities; and (3) some reflection on the governance and orchestration of the intermediary platform architectural design considerations.

In contemporary South African academia, “community engagement” is a valued commodity. My work as a nondisabled white man with disability activists and as editor of the African Journal of Disability is viewed as good for my career, and as an appropriate form of engagement and empowerment. In this article, I engage critically with the question of the extent to which capacity building is simply about increasing capacity. I ask whether capacity building inevitably involves elements of disavowal of the experience and competencies of less powerful people. I compare capacity building to the enforcement of normalcy, a process which disability scholars criticize with justification. I ask whether it is possible in unequal social contexts to engage with the politics of voice without imposing a hegemonic narrative on nondominant voices. I suggest links between the politics of engaged scholarship and processes of domestication of troubling bodies and minds.

The increasing recognition globally of the difficulties faced by local governments in their attempts to address the complex nature of urban policy has led to engaged scholarship and knowledge co-pr...

Geography has a long tradition of community-engaged research and teaching. Conventional institutional and departmental norms in many U.S. universities and colleges, however, often discourage such e...

As interest in engaged communication scholarship grows, so does the need for concrete examples of how such research is done. In this essay, we articulate an example of the how by presenting the work of the Purdue Peace Project, a locally led peacebuilding initiative based at Purdue University. We do so by (a) explicating the communicative choices in our approach to engaged scholarship and (b) relating these choices to the impacts that our approach has had on preventing political violence related to a chieftaincy dispute in Keperman (pseudonym), Ghana. Based on qualitative data from multiple time points, we unpack our communicative choices, relate these choices to the realization of engagement goals and setbacks, and reveal multi-level, interdependent, and communicative indicators of impacts. We present what we term the relationally attentive approach to engaged communication scholarship and discuss implications and recommendations for those doing engaged scholarship.

Nearly 70 years ago, the hospice movement relied upon narrative sensibilities to transform end-of-life care within a healthcare system dominated by biomedical logics. To ensure quality and safety, hospice practices are now guided by strict structures that tightly tether care professionals to routine and regulations. While volunteering on a hospice interdisciplinary team during this engaged ethnographic project, I witnessed individuals being inspired by and embracing narrative logics to reimagine an institutional script previously limited in its capacity to motivate creative, compassionate, holistic end-of-life care. These storied occasions, called Enrichment Moments, transformed rigid routines, enhanced identification with the hospice philosophy, and inspired collaboration that transcended regulatory requirements. This research suggests theoretical and practical implications in terms of urging assessment of metanarratives that guide healthcare organizing, developing a holistic view of narrative me...

The need to better engage low-income communities affected by revitalization of the built environment has been well documented in urban planning. Guided by communication infrastructure theory (CIT), this study presents a research project that made concerted efforts at engaging neighborhoods of Northeast Los Angeles that are experiencing rapid gentrification. The project was a partnership with a multi-sector collaborative working on the revitalization of the L.A. River and its surrounding communities. This paper specifically demonstrates how CIT's social ecological orientation was applied to seek input on L.A. River and community revitalization from storytelling networks made up of residents, small businesses, and local media. We also examine the impact of this engaged research on the organizational partners of the collaborative, and their views on community engagement in revitalization. Lastly, we discuss how the lessons learned broadly speak to future opportunities and challenges that aim for comm...

Research on engaged scholarship has demonstrated that it requires substantial investments of time and requires the negotiation of research partners’ multiple, differing time horizons. Although the importance of time as a resource in research collaborations is generally recognized, the implications of temporal difference among research partners need further exploration. Drawing on the meso-level model of organizational temporality, we develop a heuristic framework for analyzing the temporal enactments, temporal construals, and the designable features of temporality in key practices of engagement, namely, co-missioning, co-designing, and co-enacting. The framework is illustrated with the authors’ firsthand accounts of multiple engaged research projects that highlight concrete strategies for managing the temporal difficulties of long-term engagement.

This special issue is dedicated to the work and contributions of David R. Seibold. Throughout his 50 years in the communication discipline, Seibold’s work on teams, time, decisions, and change has had tremendous impact on scholarly thinking. His commitment to engaged scholarship and interdisciplinary work has provided a strong model for how to deal with the complex social problems of our time. Five articles in this special issue draw on Seibold’s work to move our knowledge in new directions. The final article by Dave Seibold reflects on his scholarly influences and articulates a set of ideas that communication scholars might explore in the years to come.

The author expresses heartfelt gratitude for this special issue and to collaborators throughout his career. He notes that his fundamental commitment has been to conducting theoretical studies that are methodologically rigorous and socially relevant – increasingly in the form of engaged scholarship, and he reviews applied communication research publications across his career. He addresses three ongoing foci in connection with his current roles in technology management: small firms’ choice and use of advanced information and communication technologies to enable key interaction structures; team dynamics in start-up firms; and innovation in technology companies. Three challenges and opportunities for applied communication researchers are offered: the prevalence and importance of small businesses as sites for studies; the need for a larger number and wider range of fully developed theories that are grounded in communication and that have significant sway with practitioners; and conferences for communit...

Building digital curation and sustainability into digital humanities project development is challenging, and engaging digital humanities researchers fully as partners in curation practices with the library is even more so. How can we represent the longevity and sustainability of digital humanities research projects as a shared responsibility between faculty and student researchers and library staff? Northeastern University Libraries Digital Scholarship Group has designed a series of tools and workflows to ease the burden of sustainable development, support community engagement with digital materials, and enable the library and its partners to work together to build sustainable digital projects.

The goal of this article is to clarify how current dominant understandings of community-engaged scholarship (CES) can be strengthened to incorporate lessons from critical theory and to focus on justice more explicitly. A prior analysis of how CES is defined across multiple disciplinary literatures revealed that scholars define CES as partnerships between universities and communities that collaboratively develop and apply knowledge to address public issues. Six components of CES were frequently recommended for practice within this scholarship as well. However, neither the goal of CES—to support the “public good”—nor the six recommended CES components consistently included an explicit focus on justice and critical theory. By explicitly naming and defining the goal of justice—as opposed to the “public good” —I aim to highlight the importance of conducting routine analyses in CES of whose interests motivate conceptions of the public good and how dominant cultural structures, values, and traditions negatively ...

Understanding spatial phenomena in Europe is an ongoing challenge in advancing our knowledge of complex real world phenomena. This task requires what Van de Ven called engaged scholars who are able...

Social work has a rich tradition of engagement. Throughout its history, social work scholars have taken up questions that link knowledge production to its application in practice. Recently, other higher education fields have expressed interest in engagement. Yet, social work scholars have remained relatively silent about what they have to offer this new movement. This research note examines the parallels between the development of social work and the development of higher education, the ways social work is an engaged discipline, how engaged scholarship relates to translational research and evidence-based practice, and the implications of engaged scholarship for tenure and promotion. We argue that engaged scholarship should be considered the signature research methodology of social work.

Leisure and tourism industries in regional areas are dominated by both small- and medium-sized businesses, collectively referred to as small-to-medium tourism enterprises. This paper presents a case study that describes a research initiative that was developed to engage with the wine tourism and related leisure industries of the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, Australia, where small-to-medium tourism enterprises have proliferated. The case study focusses upon a regional business performance monitoring initiative that was undertaken by a research team in collaboration with a small group of local industry champions. This paper draws upon the concept of engaged scholarship to highlight the challenges associated with building capacity of both small-to-medium tourism enterprises and the regional associations that represent them, and discusses the implications of such an approach.

This article situates Aaron Hughes’s recent work on the study of Islam, and specifically his critique of how much work in the field proceeds, in light of a current set of scholarly papers on normativity in Islamic Studies, in an effort to substantiate his critique of the field. By providing such examples (including the selective and thus self-beneficial way in which so-called engaged scholarship is carried out) the article argues that an approach to the study of religion that aims merely to repeat certain participant claims threatens the model of scholarship others of us have worked so hard to establish as the academic study of religion.

This paper reports on a study aiming to develop theory and improve practice within an Engineering Education context. The focus is on the development of students’ graduate-level work skills during Higher Education programmes and a specific practice example provided an ideal study opportunity. Engaged Scholarship, a research approach from Management Science, was selected as it provided a way to study practice that can generate both theoretical and practical knowledge. This paper summarises the philosophical underpinnings of the approach and sets out the strengths and challenges in applying it. The research design is then evaluated, concluding that the design is internally consistent and suitable for this study. The authors then reflect on implementation, provide examples of findings and discuss some of the practical challenges encountered. Practice improvements implemented to date include improvements to reflection activities and skills definition, and a theory of developing work skills in HE programmes is emerging.

This study describes a community-university partnership to support a gerontological social work student-delivered respite program, the Houseguest Program (Houseguest). Houseguest was designed using a community-engaged scholarship model of integrating research, teaching, and service. Houseguest was piloted with a small group of community-dwelling, coresiding dementia caregivers and care recipients. We examined caregivers' experiences with student-delivered respite using qualitative data analysis. Thematic analysis produced 8 themes: (a) respite from full time caregiving role, (b) information on caregiving strategies, (c) no-cost supportive services, (d) opportunity for care recipients to socialize, (e) tailored activities for care recipients, (f) rapport-building between students and family dyad, (g) reciprocity between students and family dyad, and (h) program continuation. We conclude with a proposed community-engaged scholarship model for dementia caregiving. Through a community-university partnership, Houseguest reduced the impact of caregiver burden and created an opportunity for students to serve families affected by dementia through respite and tailored activities.

We explore the development of community-engaged scholars and practitioners through two distinct lenses: faculty who facilitate engaged learning processes and student-practitioners who are enacting these processes in their work. We use an auto-ethnographic technique, our own stories, to describe the will (motivation) and capacity (knowledge) gained through community engagement. More importantly, we provide vivid accounts of marked differences in our teaching, learning, and leadership. As a result, we have become activists in our craft as practitioners and scholars.

In this article, we, two professors and two students of educational leadership, embrace the pedagogies of community engagement through the ecologies of self, organization, and community. In this article, we explore the development of community-engaged scholars and practitioners through two distinct lenses: faculty who facilitate engaged learning processes and student-practitioners who are enacting these processes in their work. We use an auto-ethnographic technique, our own stories, to describe the will (motivation) and capacity (knowledge) gained through community engagement. More importantly, we provide vivid accounts of marked differences in our teaching, learning, and leadership. As a result, we have become activists in our craft as practitioners and scholars. We also examine how our community-based teaching and learning has been manifested in our current practice..

A common question that prompts universities to reconsider their relationships and role in sustainable development in their immediate context is: How has the university over the years contributed to inclusive development of surrounding communities? Grounded in the innovation systems framework, the literature of engaged scholarship, innovation for inclusive development, and innovation platforms, the authors propose a framework for the development of a University-coordinated Inclusive Innovation Platform. The University of Fort Hare was used as a case study to reflect on what has been done and the processes and principles that have been followed during the coordination of the formation and functioning of such a platform. This paper is of interest to a wide audience as it may assist in supporting more proof-of-concept inclusive innovation projects and programmes to stimulate and support inclusive development in communities.

Currently, neoliberalism serves as the foundation for the majority of educational reform efforts. Neoliberal approaches repeatedly privilege the value of ‘expert’ knowledge in framing policy and practice, resulting in limited opportunities for the impact of local community knowledge and experience on teaching and learning. While the neoliberal context narrows what counts as learning, participatory action research (PAR), youth-led participatory action research (YPAR), and engaged scholarship emphasize collaborative problem-solving among community organizations and schools that can expose the dangers of neoliberal trends in education. The articles in this special edition, titled ‘Challenging Neoliberal Reforms through Collaborative, Community Engaged Research,’ illuminate diverse approaches to collaborative research aimed at fostering a more inclusive, productive dialog regarding the impact and possibilities for educational reforms in K-16 schools. The authors identify the specific neoliberal reform...

In this essay, we bring together academics and activists from around the world in a “conversation cafe” to share their perspectives on the past, present, and future of children and media with specific emphasis on building meaningful cross-sector partnerships. Key change-agents from academe, nonprofits, and for-profit organizations committed to youth and media literacy from the USA, the UK, Singapore, the Netherlands, Australia, and India participated in this discussion. A unique online conversation cafe was set up to facilitate discussions over a three-week period. The conversation provides a flavor of the changing media landscape, local-global tensions, industry-academe-nonprofit initiatives, and unique challenges and opportunities relating to building cross-sector partnerships in various cultural contexts. Future directions for scholarship and activism relating to youth media, technology, and arts are discussed.

The objective is to explore what engaged scholarship (ES) could mean for construction management research in facilitating interactions between practice and theory. ES aims to develop knowledge that advances both science and practice through engagement of scholars with practice. Three types of ES are discussed: practice research, design research and action research. These three kinds of ES are explained through their different knowledge–action relations: action theories or ‘knowledge about action’, design research or ‘knowledge for action’, and action research or ‘knowledge through action’. The relevance of these three types of ES in facilitating interactions between practice and theory is clarified through elaborating on a research programme on the adoption of information and communications technology (ICT) in construction projects. First, based on grounded theory, a model is developed to understand and explain why individuals and organizations are (not) using ICT in the intended way. Second, based on this model and expert interviews, solutions are designed to potential barriers to the successful use of ICT in construction projects. Third, interventions in construction projects based on these solutions are presented. It is argued that the different kinds of ES presuppose each other and are all needed to facilitate interactions between practice and theory in construction management research.

Using a critical brokerage perspective to advance theoretical insights in the development of a community university partnership and understanding of the organizational embeddedness of a community empowerment agency in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, this article suggests that partnerships between American universities and communities are perfect vehicles for envisioning engaged scholarship rooted in neighborhoods and communities. The article concludes that diversely positioned leaders and scholars in universities and schools, and indigenous leaders in the community, can learn from and apply principles of partnership and critical brokerage to work together to forward justice and change in their own neighborhoods and settings.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into government attempts at bridging the divide between theory and practice through university–industry research collaboration modelled under engaged scholarship. The findings are based on data sourced from interviews with 47 academic and industry project leaders from 23 large-scale research projects. The paper demonstrates a ceiling to the coproduction of knowledge arising from the preconceived beliefs of both academics and industry partners regarding project roles and responsibilities. The findings show that coproduction was constrained by academic partners assuming control over much of the research activities and industry partners failing to confront or challenge academic decision-making because both academics and industry partners placed a higher value on academic knowledge compared with applied or practical knowledge. It is argued the theory of engaged scholarship, and consequent initiatives to encourage engaged scholarship, fail to account for ...

Safely securing toxic waste necessitates collaboration across organizational and disciplinary boundaries. This study focused on the Waste Compliance Team (WCT), an interorganizational and interdisciplinary collaboration of a team of experts responsible for the regulatory documentation of a toxic waste storage facility. The results distill four coherent premises for self-definition evident in their collaboration: knowledge creating/scientist, knowledge checking/regulator, knowledge applying/engineer, and knowledge scheduling/project manager. Our analysis emphasized the implications of identity tensions among these competing premises for how the WCT made sense of their documentation work, safety concerns, and conflict and decision-making. Integrating multiple data sources, including interviews, observations, and a workshop with participants, we employed mosaic portraiture, a methodology developed through the study, to understand and convey the polyphony of the site. We conclude by discussing implications of...

Trends in policy, practice, and research point to the need for a community-engaged Scholarship of Practice (SOP) model that can be used to inform the development of occupational therapy practitioners, educators, and researchers. This article describes a community-engaged SOP model, the evidence justifying the need for such a model, and strategies to effectively create community-engaged practitioners, educators and career scientists within occupational therapy. We highlight several examples of community-based participatory research to further inform this model, and in turn, translate this knowledge back to communities for action and systems change that can affect the lives of people with disabilities and the communities in which they seek to live and participate long term.

The value of critical dialogic reflexivity is demonstrated through analysis of interview conversations between academic and practitioner partners in Circles® USA, a national nonprofit organization working to ameliorate poverty. The partnerships include the academic/practitioner author with six others: Circles founder and CEO, a lead trainer and codeveloper of training curriculum, and four individuals working to move out of poverty. The analysis features examples of critical dialogic reflexivity related to negotiating macro-, meso- and microcontextual structures, cultural identifications, status locations, privilege, and ideologies that impact their relationships and work to end poverty. Caveats and implications for critical community engagement, intercultural alliances and engaged scholarship are discussed.

I recently completed 74 oral history interviews with refugees from multiple origins to ascertain how they interpret and learn from popular and government-produced media throughout their relocation to the USA. This multisited, multilingual research presented a unique manifestation of the ethical and pragmatic considerations inherent within qualitative research. In this brief essay, I reflect on the challenges and implications of planning, doing, and writing engaged scholarship in peculiar contexts.

This study utilizes Bok's framework of core competencies for undergraduate education to investigate the changes of college and university students participating in the Camp AdventureTM Child and Youth Services (CACYS) programme. Communication, critical thinking, character development, citizenship, diversity, global understanding, widening of interests, and career and vocational development were the eight core competencies included in the study. Five hundred and seventeen individuals from 14 CACYS staff development sites were invited to participate in a three-phase design wherein data was collected at baseline, after the completion of the staff development course, and at the conclusion of one's field experience. The questionnaire consisted of 56 items measured on a 7-point Likert-type scale. Two hundred and seven individuals completed all three phases. Results indicate significant growth in all of participants’ core competencies from the baseline to the completion of the CACYS programme. Findings suggest t...

Responsible innovation requires that scientific and other expert practices be responsive to society. We take stock of a variety of collaborative approaches to socio-technical integration that seek to broaden the societal contexts technical experts take into account during their routine activities. Part of a larger family of engaged scholarship that includes inter- and trans-disciplinarity as well as stakeholder and public engagement, we distinguish collaborative socio-technical integration in terms of its proximity to and transformation of expert practices. We survey a variety of approaches that differ widely in terms of their integrative methods, conceptions of societal context, roles, and aspirations for intervention. Taking a handful of “communities of integration” as exemplars, we then provide a framework for comparing the forms, means, and ends of collaborative integration. We conclude by reflecting on some of the main features of, and tensions within, this developing arena of practical inquiry and engagement and what this suggests for integrative efforts aimed at responsible innovation.

In this paper, we discuss the experiences of our academic research centre, which is dedicated to conducting community-engaged scholarship (CES) with criminal justice professionals from government and non-profit sectors. In doing so, we describe the benefits and challenges we have observed in collaborating with criminal justice agencies as it pertains to the relevance of the research conducted, ability to implement recommendations and measure outcomes, implications for data collection methods, access to knowledge and expertise, expectations about the research, communication and organizational change. We also present our partners’ perceptions of working collaboratively with a university centre. Some of the benefits they identified include being able to access external research, improve their programmes, engage in capacity building, and make better decisions; few challenges were mentioned. Further, we describe the key ingredients that have helped us sustain our collaborative relationships: mutually beneficia...

The purpose of this study is to understand a citywide initiative to increase diversity and inclusion in a predominantly white US city with a tragic racial history. This research reveals prevailing struggles with communicating about diversity and race and taking meaningful actions to promote social change. Using theories of difference and dialogue, we analyze in-depth, qualitative fieldwork with three voluntary organizations: The Chamber of Commerce; The Network; and Minorities in Business. Our work answers calls to center race and embodied differences and extends theorizing on dialogic sensibilities. The findings reveal that difference organizes dialogue through: (1) the ongoing construction of context; (2) the mobilizing of social change efforts; and (3) the intermingling of economic and racial justice discourses. Ultimately, we hope this work encourages further conversation about difference, race, and engaged scholarship.

In this article, we turn the tripartite responsibility of teaching, scholarship, and service inside out. Rather than considering service to be a poor stepchild to scholarship and teaching, we reason that service as engaged scholarship should be the centerpiece of academic life, especially in an applied discipline like parks, recreation, and tourism. We reason further that improving engaged service should be the driving force behind good teaching, student learning, and scholarship. Finally, we reason that “impact factor,” a term commonly limited to citations in scholarly journals, should be expanded to include positive differences made on the ground in professional practice as well as scholarly presentations and publications that display the value of the scholarship of engagement and the scholarship on teaching and learning.

This essay presents a methodological approach, ethnographic facilitation (EF), through which applied communication scholars (1) employ ethnographic practices to develop a rich, nuanced understanding of communication within and constitutive of groups, organizations, and/or communities; (2) intervene into communicative practices using group facilitation processes to promote change or development for the group, organization, community, and/or its members; and (3) report their findings to scholarly and relevant practitioner communities. The essay explains how EF draws on, yet differs from, and extends related methodological approaches, such as ethnography, critical ethnography, discourse tracing, and participatory action research, and integrates traditional facilitation practices with ethnography. Implications of the methodology are discussed regarding site selection, researcher conduct and relationships, techniques used to describe and facilitate communication, facilitation assessment, and dissemination of r...

This article uses the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas as a lens through which to examine the business and culture of pornography. I argue that adult-industry trade shows are data-rich field sites that allow pornography scholars to move beyond a focus on the pornographic text and examine the wider industry context that gives rise to contemporary porn cultures. These events are also occasions to practice ‘porn studies-in-action,’ a research approach that involves scholars spending time in those places where pornography is made, distributed, and consumed in an effort to better understand how cultural discourses and practices are organized in specific institutional and organizational contexts. Porn studies-in-action is a form of engaged scholarship that can take as its focus any number of cultural sites, from erotic film festivals to feminist porn sets to adult video stores, with the aim of empirically deepening our porn studies archives.

This paper describes the research process that informed the development of the MetaConnects platform, a university-based engaged scholarship initiative that connected communication researchers with community-based social change organizers. The paper outlines the investigation of community organizers' communication practices and demonstrates the utility that these findings had for the work of the practitioners. It also explores the lessons learned by the academic researchers in terms of the potentials and limitations of their engaged approach. The work highlights the theoretical and practical significance of communication ecologies—a term that refers to the networks of communication connections that groups or individuals depend upon in order to achieve a goal. It argues that, for academic researchers, understanding the communication ecologies of community-based practitioners can be an essential way to design optimally functioning engaged scholarship initiatives. An understanding of communication ecologies ...

Developing an emancipatory interest enables individuals to free themselves from the intersubjective or commonly held meanings that dominate their understanding of their current world, and subsequently change their practices. We argue that developing an emancipatory interest is critical in learning to create social change, that is, wanting to create a better world and society for self and others. In this paper we provide an insight on how to do this by drawing on research about a learning program with Australian university students. A semi-structured interview schedule using eight broad questions was administered between March and May 2011 with students involved in the program. The discussion is informed by Habermas' concept of the life-world and the use of the data analysis tool Leximancer.

This short essay queries the obligation of rhetorical scholars to theorize in the current conjuncture and closes (in) on some of the entailments of recent calls to engaged social justice scholarship and activism.

Organizations have changed dramatically over the last decade as globalization, new technology, and generational shifts shape almost every aspect of twenty-first century American society. Ideally, communication education would prepare students for experiences in the workplaces they will join after they graduate, but some have suggested that academia is disconnected from the realities of organizations. In these two studies we examined the degree to which organizational communication textbooks have kept pace with those changes. The first consisted of interviews with local organizational leaders. Those leaders identified communication-related issues that were important in their organizations. The second study consisted of a content analysis assessing the degree to which organizational communication textbooks address the themes found in Study One. The more abstract themes from Study One were found in abundance, but the practical applications of those themes were under-represented in these textbooks.

Community engagement is central to the public and civic mission of a growing number of colleges and universities, and numerous faculty members are applying their expertise to issues of importance to local communities and the larger society. However, there have been few first-hand descriptions of the career paths of faculty who engage in community-engaged scholarship. Faced with the current traditional typology of faculty work—teaching, research, and service—junior faculty in particular are often advised to postpone their community engagement work until after they secure their foundation in research and teaching. The author is a tenured full professor who regards community-engaged scholarship as central to his work. Using an autoethnographic style, he reflects on the motivations, influences, and experiences that have informed his intentional efforts to integrate teaching, research, and service into his professional identity as a community-engaged scholar. His story is an invitation for present and future s...