Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: Given the costs associated with providing healthcare to low health literate audiences, communicating information to low health literate individuals is an important issue. But with the continuous increasing complexity of health information, even those with adequate health literacy can appreciate simpler health communication. This project investigated the potential for two specially-tailored e-health interventions, designed to provide information to low health literate audiences, to deliver information to broader and more health literate audiences. These websites provided information through animated health providers, with supporting images and animations. Subjects approved of both websites’ designs, preferring the newer and more graphically appealing of the two. Respondents learned from both interventions, as measured by pre- and post-tests of knowledge. Participants did not exhibit significant preferences for animated health providers matching their own ethnicity, suggesting the importance of true cultural customization of content. Study results provide interesting implications for both health communication professionals and researchers.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Work in Progress
Abstract: Audience studies and citizenship studies are often thought about as separate fields of inquiry located within different disciplines. Audience studies, usually situated within the interdisciplines of communications and cultural studies, focus on how media/popular culture audiences use and make-meaning of texts. Citizenship studies are most often situated within the social science disciplines of political science, sociology, and more recently anthropology with a focus on cultural citizenship. However, with the exception of the burgeoning work of Joke Hermes (2005), Toby Miller (1993, 1998), Vicki Mayer (2003) and Arlene Davila (2000, 2001), few scholars have attempted to examine the intersections between culture, audience, and citizenship. In this essay, I discuss the overlaps between these two bodies of literature and the ways in which a methodological focus on audience media ethnography can inform theories of cultural citizenship and vice versa. In particular, I explore what this kind of approach might mean for studying Latina/o audiences in particular. In doing so, I hope to provide a framework for a more broader, systemic understanding of the crossroads of culture, cultural products and practices, and cultural citizenship.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Despite the transnational corporation’s vital role in the global political economy and the controversy this position has fueled, critical rhetorical scholars have done curiously little in the way of theorizing how these institutions rhetorically construct and maintain the legitimacy of their power. Building upon rhetorical conceptions of the audience, this essay theorizes the material limits of pledges of corporate social responsibility (CSR). It argues that with strategic inclusion and exclusion of particular audiences, the corporation is able to simultaneously evade its critics, enhance its image, and increase the legitimacy of its participation in ever- widening areas of public concern. Monsanto Comapny's pledge is examined.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper, which grew out of my own ethnographically oriented audience research, examines some recent approaches to audience research and suggests a theoretical framework that emphasizes the social relations of audiences. This is in keeping with calls for a “renewed theorization of the audience” (Schiller 1996: 193) in media cultural studies. Also addressed are some issues from anthropology and ethnographic research that have come up in my own study or which could help in future studies. I argue in particular that the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1977, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992) and Anthony Giddens (1979, 1991a, 1991b) can help overcome some of the problems of audience research, just as the work of Williams, as extended by Dan Schiller, can help place audience research within the sociology of culture, or the study of society (Schiller 1996, Williams 1977, 1981).