Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: This paper provides a critical communications analysis of public diplomacy programs and the relational ties, positive or negative, to public relations. Is public relations closely allied to public diplomacy? Is it at fault for the failures of U.S. public diplomacy since 9/11? Or is public relations in need of its own extreme makeover in both public perception and media framing? In an effort to devise an answer to these question of relational parallels between public diplomacy and public relations, the author analyzes the way public relations is framed in the debate and discourse of failures of U.S. public diplomacy since 9/11. Such writings have often centered their criticism on the failure of strategies to persuade through attempts to "sell" a positive image of the United States to the rest of the world. This selling strategy, a failure to "tell" America's story to the world (USIA's motto) in favor of selling or hyping a positive image of America, is presented as a one-way asymmetrical public relations approach, which leaves out an entire discourse and debate on public relations strategies that may prove useful to a more complete public diplomacy toolbox. The often overlooked public relations strategies, those which could help explain, clarify and possibly improve the image of public relations within the public diplomacy community, include two-way symmetrical communication strategies, relationship building and influence models, all of which will be presented in the paper as cases where strategic communications efforts prevail over antiquated one-way asymmetrical public relations campaigns.

Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: Its time to change the acronym KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) to INOC (It’s Not Only Cognitive) to come to terms with the limits of cognitive rationalism. Since Daniel Goleman initially popularized emotional intelligence (EI), it has spread out of education into a number of different disciplines and practices. This paper tracks back to the little-known business origins of that strand of EI and its relation to outstanding leaders in organisations. It examines how it, and subsequent EI research in workplaces, are implemented. It also explores the disciplinary beginnings of allied research in key relevant fields such as cognitive neuroscience, and how it has been applied in consultancy situations. It ends by pulling together the findings from these diverse fields to set out a program for the application of emotional intelligence to the theory and practice of public relations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Fifty-two healthy adults who were in marital or cohabiting romantic relationships provided self-report data for psychological outcomes and blood samples for hematological tests, and were then randomly assigned to experimental and control groups for a six-week trial. Those in the experimental group were instructed to increase the frequency of romantic kissing in their relationships; those in the control group received no such instructions. After six weeks, psychological and hematological tests were repeated. Relative to the control group, the experimental group experienced improvements in perceived stress, relationship satisfaction, and total serum cholesterol.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines two different attempts to copyright dance in the twentieth century in order to expose the cultural and racial entanglements that shaped the formation of choreographic copyright in the United States. Although the U.S. Federal Copyright Act of 1976 marked the first time choreographic works were expressly identified as a subject of copyright, some dance compositions were copyrighted before then under the category of dramatic and dramatico-musical works. In 1926, according to several sources, the African American blues singer Alberta Hunter copyrighted the Black Bottom, a black vernacular dance that was popularized on the theatrical stage and became a national and international craze. Whether or not these accounts are true, the contention itself deserves attention, especially in light of competing claims by the white producer George White to have invented the Black Bottom and its association with the white dancer Ann Pennington. Over twenty years later, in 1952, the German-born modern dancer Hanya Holm sought a copyright for the dances she choreographed for the 1948 Broadway production of Kiss Me, Kate and reportedly “made history” as the first to secure a copyright for a choreographic composition. The dance styles featured in Kiss Me, Kate ranged from ballet and modern to jazz and social dance. A comparison of the cases of Hunter and Holm helps illuminate the cross-cultural and interracial traffic which copyright has simultaneously relied upon and concealed. Beneath the struggle to win copyright protection for choreography in the United States, I will show, lies a complex history of encounters between artistic genres and racialized constructions of authorship.

As Rosemary Coombe writes in The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties (1998), the bifurcated legal system that governs expressive output – one set of laws for intellectual property, another for cultural property – “reflect[s] and secure[s]” a colonialist logic that divides the realm of Art from the realm of culture (243). A similar dichotomy obtains in the field of dance, where high Art/low art binaries continue to treat concert dance and popular or folk dance as separate and unequal. Contrasting notions of creativity and authorship underpin this division: whereas vernacular forms like the Black Bottom are considered products of anonymous folk masses, modern dance compositions are attributed to a single author, often figured as a creative genius . In line with this logic, U.S. copyright law excludes “social dance steps and simple routines” from protection. Yet the cases of Hunter’s Black Bottom and Holm’s Kiss Me, Kate unsettle the customary boundaries between (black) vernacular dance and (white) modern dance, revealing how constructed – and mutually dependent – these opposing conceptions of authorship are.

My investigation takes an interdisciplinary approach, bringing scholarship on copyright and authorship in legal and cultural studies into dialogue with dance studies, and drawing on primary sources such as biographies, copyright records, newspaper advertisements, periodical accounts, programs, and film footage. Ultimately, I hope to shed new light on the cultural heterogeneity and racial and artistic hierarchies in which American institutions like copyright law are enmeshed.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Kissing Jessica Stein tells the story of Jessica, a Jewish copy editor frustrated with dating. Jessica answers a personal ad submitted by a bisexual woman. Although the film situates Jessica firmly as Jewish, its reviewers and blog discussants focus almost exclusively on the lesbian content, rendering Jessica a Woody Allen-like “neurotic” New Yorker. This essay questions why the film’s treatment of Jewishness and lesbianism/bisexuality differs from perceptions of what the film is “about.” Why does the film recuperate Jewishness while disavowing the lesbian relationship, a turn in the plot that proves frustrating to gay and lesbian consumers of the film? Jewish studies scholars point to the historical insider/outsider dualism that has shaped the lives of American Jews, a dualism that reaffirms the tension of striving to be part of the multiculturalist project, yet simultaneously wanting to enjoy the privileges of whiteness. This discourse resembles the “post-Jewishness” of other contemporary representations.