Publication Type: Performance
Abstract: "Stripped and Teased: Scandalous Stories with Subversive Subplots" is a theatre performance that illuminates topics such a female body image, cultural beauty norms, the social construction of gender and the economics of being female. The show does this through engaging and humorous stories and performance poetry that are based on real-life experiences – ethnographic and autoethnographic data. The session will include performed excerpts from the show, with the interactive portions focused on the specific audience of NWSA in discussion of performance as a feminist pedagogy and how that’s working, using the show itself as a departure for discussion.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Although research on organizational change has achieved significant growth in developing variable-analytic models with the purpose of predicting change outcomes and stage-models in mapping change trajectories, our understanding of how change is implemented in micro-practices and managed in situated interactions is very limited. Recent development calls for a performative and discursive approach to organizational change. Responding to this call, this study investigates how organizational change takes place in discourse as attempts to fix the meaning of change. Specifically, this paper examines several excerpts of a change management meeting among the CEO, his top management team, and middle managers in the headquarter of a large U.S. insurance corporation. Drawing upon Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and Foucault (Foucault, 1972), the study demonstrates the process in which organizational members fixed the meaning of change by articulating change into preferred larger discourses while (re)producing specific control relationships through talk in interaction. The study also demonstrates how managerialism was enacted in discourse that suppressed conflict and genuine dialogue.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This experimental study of voting age young persons was initiated to examine the importance of race and gender cues in political communication using a lens that’s been scantly applied to these important issues: the individual receiver’s need for cognition. Specifically, we find suggestions from the literature on NFC that how high or low an individual scores on this information processing trait may in fact be related to how they will also process race and gender in evaluating political candidates. Using an online news excerpt , containing differing visual cues of race and gender and consistent information, research questions ask if race cues and gender cues impact evaluation of numerous candidate characteristics that were factor analyzed into five resultant dependent variables: communication, leadership, competence, credibility, and degree of conservatism. Results suggest NFC does impact the manner in which participants processed information about political candidates; however, the influence of candidate race and gender on voters’ perceptions indicates that candidate race may function as a more important cue than candidate gender.