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This paper documents a half-semester service-learning teaching activity for engaging students to think critically about intercultural communication theory. In collaboration with a community partner, students in my intercultural communication class researched the influence of the Great Migration on U.S. society, producing five books summarizing academic research and interviews students conducted with community members who had migrated to the Kansas City area during this time period. The students presented their work to the community at the end of the semester. Variations of this assignment are also proposed for instructors who might want to do something similar in their classes. Courses: Intercultural Communication. Objectives: (1) Apply, analyze, and evaluate cultural transition and collective memory theory. (2) Produce an original work on a topic of interest to a community partner.

The introductory public speaking class includes topics such as audience analysis, credibility, organization, visual aids, and delivery. While the pedagogy I employ in this class tends to be very interactive and require a lot of group work, 2020 will forever be known as the year of the COVID19 global pandemic, which produced social distancing, stay-at-home-orders, and mask wearing. This study examines the impacts of pandemic precautions on public speaking practice, specifically situational communication apprehension. In addition to recording my own observations throughout my face-to-face public speaking class, I also periodically interviewed students about their experience taking the course during a pandemic. The paper ends with a discussion of a situational approach to public speaking, with pedagogical possibilities for instructors.

The United States has witnessed a public display of outrage toward critical race theory (CRT). This opposition has been buoyed by White evangelical Christian polemics. I conducted a discourse-historical analysis of 21 statements, reflecting a diversity of voices within evangelical discourse (ED). First, ED constructs CRT as both bereft of theoretical validity and evil. Second, the discourse inverts the objectives of CRT by claiming those goals for its own. Third, ED seeks to strip CRT of its transformative and emancipatory power. Fourth, ED constructs CRT in ways that diffuse accountability. Finally, ED questions the faith of Christians who seek to learn from CRT. Reflection is offered for how CRT and Christianity might conspire together toward the aims of addressing racial inequity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents a half-semester service-learning teaching activity for engaging students to think critically about intercultural communication theory. In collaboration with a community partner, students in my intercultural communication class researched the influence of the Great Migration on U.S. society, producing five books summarizing academic research and interviews students conducted with community members who had migrated to the Kansas City area during this time period. The students presented their work to the community at the end of the semester. Variations of this assignment are also proposed for instructors who might want to do something similar in their classes. Intercultural Communication. Objectives: (1) Apply, analyze, and evaluate cultural transition and collective memory theory. (2) Produce an original work on a topic of interest to a community partner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon an ethnographic project in a farm community, this article outlines one specific procedure for (and benefits of) ethnographic mapping in the study of discourses of whiteness. Situated within a spatial approach, ethnographic mapping provides a vehicle for analyzing the discursive and contextual fluidity of whiteness. In particular, relationships between representational spaces and spatial practices are elucidated, which then allows the scholar to deconstruct on-the-ground embodiment of whiteness as it intersects with symbolic discursive formations in a dialectic relationship with material structures. Scholars desiring to employ maps in their research can examine (1) what is included, (2) what is excluded, (3) what labels are used to name sections and locations, (4) what is given visual prominence through size and centrality, and (5) what participants describe after having drawn their maps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report the findings of an experimental study that tested the contributions of semiotic and critical discourse studies on immigration. Two-way analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were conducted to examine the effects of immigration terminology (illegal immigrant, spouse of green card holder, and parent of U.S. citizen child) on measures of attribution and empathy. Our experiment revealed a statistically significant difference in attribution. Participants who received a narrative prompt with the term 'illegal immigrant' evaluated the character's situation with internal attribution, and thus deserving of any negative outcomes, such as racial profiling, deportation, and separation from one's family. This finding is consistent with studies that have reported the concrete effects of immigrant labels on public opinion and policy, as (im)migrants become scapegoats for macro-structural forces. Our experiment did not reveal an effect on empathy, demonstrating the complicated symbolic and material effects produced by immigration discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I argue that masculinity is commodified through the symbolic and material (re)productions of man cave space, constituting subject identity positions, including traditional domestic/work roles and gender essentialism. I conducted a critical discourse analysis of the DIY Network show Man Caves, which obfuscates socioeconomic realities while conjoining consumption with constructions of "authentic" masculinity. The show simultaneously evaluates men's worth by their proficiency in carpentry. The necessity of these private, residential retreats from anxiety-inducing challenges to patriarchy is legitimated through discourses of dichotomization and domesticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural communities increasingly have become sites of struggle over identity, belonging and citizenship. While historically the relationship between race and space has been one of segregation and displacement, investigations of these sites of (im)migration reveal new discursive relationships and particular manifestations of whiteness. Adopting a spatial framework, this ethnographic study seeks to de-essentialize whiteneness through an exploration of discourses of contraction articulated by members of a farm community. Contraction refers to white residents’ representation of “Hispanicness” as spreading throughout (and threatening) “their” town, specifically commercial and educational spaces. The implications of contraction include the re-consolidation of white privilege as the “minority” group within a context of spatial integration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the ways in which people who have Multiple Sclerosis construct their "condition" as an intragroup cultural identity. The researcher utilized participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and textual analysis in this investigation. MS identity is discursively constructed in terms of disequilibrium, discordance, detachment, dichotomy, and diminished self. An MS identity is predicated on the grounds of uncertainty, and fosters a shared experience of difference. This paper further problematizes the notion of fixed identities, and examines the complex, but empowering, coping strategies of detachment, dichotomization, and diminishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]