Department of Communication•Texas A&M University

1. Legal rhetoric. I have published articles on constitutional hermeneutics (how do we make sense of the constitutional text?), the First Amendment (especially the religion clauses in relation to our national nervous breakdown about the relationship between religion and state), and persuasive strategies in the appellate process, especially oral arguments and judicial opinions. Current projects include: a book on legal rhetoric (co-authored with a law professor), and an article defending Justice Hugo Black’s textualist approach to constitutional interpretation. I also am serving a 3-year term as editor of Free Speech Yearbook, if anyone is interested in helping me with editorial work.

2. Economic rhetoric: I have published books on rhetoric and Marxism (1994) and on the rhetoric of radical free market advocates (2001), as well as essays on presidential discourse about the economy, Federal Reserve Bank conspiracy theory, and discursive approaches to labor history. My main project currently is a book on the Gastonia textile strike of 1929, the first Communist-led strike in US history. The strike was a dismal failure, but six novels, a major Broadway play, and several landmark works in sociology were written about it. My focus in the book is on the role of narrative in Marxist ideology and in historiography.

3. The Historical Sociology of Rhetoric. My long-term project is to write a history of rhetoric in Western culture from the standpoint of historical sociology. Previous histories have concentrated on theory texts while neglecting actual rhetorical ractice in law, religion, and politics, as well as the impact of communication technology on rhetorical practice (writing, print, broadcasting, the Internet). In a more abstract sense, what do Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Parsons, Habermas, and Bourdieu have to tell us about communication and persuasion in relation to the structure/agency problem in social analysis?

I received my Ph.D. in 2000 from The University of Texas at Austin. I research and write in the areas of critical media studies and telecommunications policy. I wrote Digital Music Wars with Tom McCourt (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), which illuminates and critiques digital distribution by the popular music industry. I am currently preparing a monograph called Music and Cyberliberties, which is on media activism by musicians, music fans, artists, and researchers (for Wesleyan University Press). I am research fair use and music for the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, with Kembrew McLeod ( University of Iowa). I am preparing a report for the European Union Center of Excellence on intellectual property rights activism around software (especially media players) in Europe. I am also conducting a survey of regulatory reforms and changes of ownership in wireless and wireline telephony in Latin America ( Mexico and Brazil). I teach COMM 663, Mapping the Information Society, and COMM 352, Political Economy of Telecommunications and Media, during the Fall 2006 semester. I will be on leave in the Spring of 2007. My email is pburkart@tamu.edu. Write me! My office hours are Tuesdays, 10-11, and by appointment, at Bolton 205B. Visit me!

I am connected to the Telecommunication and Media Studies section. I am especially interested in the intersection of media, religion and culture. My research primarily falls within areas of new media/internet studies, social shaping of technology, social network analysis, popular culture studies and sociology of religion. Some of the general question I am interested in include: “What is the nature of community in a global information society?”, “How is religion being transformed through the internet?” and “How do new media practices and technologies influence identity construction and authority structures?” My current research projects include:

Blogging and Religious Identity: a content analysis study of how religious identity and discourse are expressed and negotiated within blogs of Christians, Muslims & Jews and how these might support or challenge traditional forms of authority.
IMing and Undergrads : an online survey project on Instant Messaging use amongst university students. This is part of an international study with researchers based in Israel and Canada.
HAY Project : a survey of how religious beliefs influence perception and use of new media technologies amongst university students in Israel.
Networked Religion : a collaborative comparative study of five major world religion’s (Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism & Judaism) use and perception of the internet, which seeks to identify common trends of how the practice of religion online reflects dominant changes in the way religion functions within a global information society.
SCOT Project: a discourse analysis of religious youth sub-culture in Scotland. This is based on ethnographic study of recorded youth prayer meetings in Scotland used to determine the common language and images used amongst Scottish young people to frame their religious identity.
Science & Religion Primer : co-editor of an introductory reference book of essays and key terms related to the History, philosophy and theology of science and religion studies.
When Religion Meets New Media : a book project mapping the current state of study of religion and new media. Special attention is given Jewish, Christian and Muslim group’s interaction with the internet.

^back to the top

My primary research interest involves the communicative processes through which social and organizational power relationships are created/sustained/transformed, and, conversely, the processes through which social and organizational power relationships guide/constrain/tranform communicative practices. I currently am involved in two major projects. One, conducted with colleagues in colleges of engineering in the Texas, the US, and Mexico, consists of ethnographic studies of corporations (US, German, French, and Japanese) operating production facilities off-shore. This project is essentially complete and should be published by Wiley's science/engineering division sometime next year. The second project investigates the impact that organizations have on health care policymaking. Part of the project is a "close comparison" of health policymaking in the US and Canada (a large, sparsely-populated country located north of the Red River).

^back to the top

For the last several years, Dorsey has focused on rhetoric and public affairs, particularly political and presidential rhetoric in the Progressive Era. He has written primarily on the public rhetoric of Theodore Roosevelt (TR). Most of his work revolves around examining the myths that public advocates use to empower their agendas.

Dorsey will begin examining the intersection between race, ethnicity, gender, popular culture, myth, and identity. Dorsey is finishing his book manuscript on TR and race/ethnicity/identity construction during the turn of the 20 th century. He is also working on an essay on TR and the woman’s movement. He will start work soon on analyzing the media coverage following Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction.” Early next year, he will begin examining the media coverage surrounding the Scottsboro Boys, a group of teenage African Americans who were falsely accused of rape in the early 1930s, and whose trials were watershed moments for Blacks, Communists, and the legal system.

I focus on research of organizational processes primarily in nonprofit organizational settings. Primarily, I focus on organizational knowledge and identification through belonging and communities of practice (analyzing mostly volunteers), community belonging (post-disaster relocation) and collective information technologies (enterprise content management and 211). Additionally, I have been exploring the discursive construction of accountability for nonprofit firms (e.g. Red Cross Liberty Fund).

Antonio C. La Pastina is an associate professor at the Communication Department at Texas A&M University in College Station, He holds a Ph.D. from the Radio-TV-Film Department at University of Texas at Austin. His research interests are on media ethnography; the representation of otherness in mainstream media and its role on diasporic cultures as well as the implications of the digital divide to peripheral communities. He has conducted research in the Lower Rio Grande Valley and central Texas, Northeast of Brazil and Central Italy. He teaches courses in communication and culture, ethnography, globalization, media, gender and race, and US and Latin American popular culture. His work has appeared in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Communication Research,Intercom, as well as in several edited books. Before moving to the United States in the late 1980s he worked as a journalist in São Paulo, Brazil, his native country.

His current book project address the construction of representations of Brazil since the 1930 to the present in the United States media. This project, unlike most of his previous research relies heavily on close textual readings and archival research. He is also beginning the planning of his next ethnography work on communication, identity and the environment in the Amazon. He is also working on a small project on the “garbage of the information age” looking at the environmental and social price for disadvantaged populations for the contemporary crave for the new.

In general I use textual and historical methods to study communication. The object of my research is to understand the ways in which American citizens have been encouraged and discouraged from participating in the political process. In order to understand this complex discourse I draw from the disciplines of American Studies, History, Political Theory, Philosophy, Literary Theory and Criticism, and Critical Theory. In other words, I write rhetorical histories of debates about the role of the American citizen the goal of which is to answer a question also posed by Michel Foucault, “what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh down upon” Americans to render them disinterested, disengaged, and apathetic about politics?

My initial research projects have examined how the first two generations of Americans debated what it meant to form a government based on the will of the people. My answer is that they invented a “republican fiction” in support of their new government and that this fiction drew from both romantic and tragic narratives. The second generation turned the Founder’s republican fictions into the myth of democracy, which is uncontested and unquestionable today. My first book project, Founding Fictions tells this story and questions whether or not this democratic myth is actually democratic. My next major project will examine how order, control, and safety have been used in debates among political theorists in American history. For this project I will focus on how Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson debated order; how Walter Lipmann and John Dewey debated control; and how Robert Nozick and Noam Chomsky debated safety. In addition to these major projects I am also in the process of completing several essays on such topics as: deliberative democracy, the use of romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire in theories of American citizenship, economic argument in the Whiskey Rebellion, romantic republicanism and Thomas Jefferson’s “Last Letter,” and John Quincy Adams great blunder as “Publicola.”

My research interests are at the crossroads of organizational communication and health communication, with a healthy dose of family communication thrown in for good measure. In early years of my career, I developed an interest in how communication “causes” stress and burnout among human service workers and how communication can help these individuals “cope” with challenging work situations. This early interest has developed into more recent research considering emotion in the workplace, communication and identity issues among human service workers, the implications of organizational systems such as managed care on the lives of care providers, and the ways in which family caregivers negotiate their roles and identities with health care workers and family members. I was trained in social scientific research methods, though my research now spans approaches including interviews, textual analysis, surveys, and autoethnography.

I am now in the end stages of a research project in collaboration with Martha Shoemaker, Jennifer Willyard, and Penny Addison. We have conducted interviews with family caregivers providing care for elderly parents and are analyzing those interviews in terms of caregiver identity, interaction with the health care system, and negotiation with siblings regarding care responsibility. I am also starting projects with other graduate students in areas including patient encounters with the Medicaid system and the social construction of the elderly by workers in long-term care facilities. In addition to these projects (which make sense with my research background), I am also beginning a book project which will examine the hundreds of letters my father wrote home to his family during his service in the Army in World War II. These letters (and other textual and interview materials) will be considered in terms of the process through which an adolescent moves into adulthood through lenses of family, war, bureaucracy, travel, and relationships with colleagues.

My research interests fall into the categories of conflict management, negotiation, and resistance in organizations. More specifically, these interests take the forms of gender and feminist analyses of negotiation, conflict management in the workplace, and discourse patterns in negotiation. I have also conducted research on emotions and emotional labor in organizations, organizational culture and subculture conflicts, and environmental conflicts.

I am currently working on four different research projects. One deals with media and conflict framing of an intractable environmental conflict. This project entails qualitative discourse analysis of conflict frames and media framing in the coverage of the Edwards Aquifer dispute. Three other projects center on rethinking models of negotiation from feminist perspectives, communicative patterns and processes that transform conflict situations, and the questioning process in negotiation/conflict settings. Investigating communicative practices in conflict also centers on examining turning points in a dispute, links between reframing and reflecting, and the role of symbolic and material consequences in managing conflicts. These projects entail discourse analyses of transcripts (e.g., videotapes and interviews) and case analyses of discursive representations of the stakeholders, the media, and the conflict parties.

I believe that research on mass communication processes and effects in the intercultural/international context is both interesting and important. Within this broad area of research, I focus on gender and race stereotypes in the media and their role in shaping inter-group attitudes. I approach this research from a social science perspective, drawing on theories from psychology, sociology, and education.

I look forward to collaborating with grad students who share my research interests and are curious to learn more about media effects theories. Some of my current projects include (1) representations of Asian Americans in entertainment programming, (2) gender stereotypes in Indian soap operas, (3) gender role expectations in online dating ads, and (4) an experimental study on the activation and suppression of media stereotypes.

My research interests center on the political uses of rhetoric in America. My publications usually deal with fairly contemporary topics (televised presidential debates, presidential campaign speeches, and presidential speechwriting), but I am fascinated by continuities in rhetoric that reach as far back as the 17 th-century New England Puritans and as far forward as the next significant presidential address. Increasingly, I discover those continuities in two areas: 1) in the political uses of America’s historic religious rhetoric (the jeremiad, apocalyptic rhetoric, the rhetoric of contrition) and 2) in the genres of American political rhetoric (presidential nomination acceptance addresses, campaign victory and concession speeches, inaugural addresses). I have published a series of studies on presidential rhetoric, including examinations of the public discourses for presidents from FDR to George W. Bush, but I am as interested in what such rhetoric tells us about American society as what it tells us about those particular presidents. I enjoy working with graduate students on research projects. Over the years, I have published half a dozen studies with co-authors who were graduate students at the time the research appeared in print, including 3 journal articles and 3 book chapters.

I study media anthropology and systems of communication ranging from ritual through community to media industries, with special interest in music and radio. You can see a more formal biographical statement and a short vita on our web page. My three most recent publications are “The self as a sacred object in media” (in J. Sumiala-Seppänen (Ed.), Implications of the sacred in (post) modern media, Nordicom, 2006); “Déchirure Symbolique et Processus de Réparation: Paprés-coup du 11 Septembre” [Symbolic disorder and repair after 9/11] (in D. Dayan & P. Raynaud (Eds.), La Terreur Spectacle ou À chacun son 11 Septembre, Paris: Institut National de l’audiovisuel, 2006); and “The strange career of Robert Johnson’s records” (in S. Jones & J. Jensen (Eds.), Afterlife as afterimage: Understanding posthumous fame (pp. 209-234), Peter Lang, 2005). Two other articles of current work are “For-the-record aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s blues style as a product of recorded culture” (in press, Popular Music) and “Myth and collective memory in the case of Robert Johnson” (just revised for the second round of reviews).

The largest of my current projects is a cultural history of the American radio industry circa 1947-62, (in collaboration with Tom McCourt of Fordham University, for a book at University of Illinois Press). Our primary focus is the development of the modern formatting system by which styles of music and talk, and the demographic characteristics of audience members are sorted and separated onto different radio stations. This now taken for granted system was developed without self-awareness, by business people worrying about business problems, yet operates as a system of communication and culture, cultivating the listening habits of a world in which it makes sense. Today, no one would expect an urban hits station to play country music, a country station to play rap, or rural and urban, whites and blacks to listen together or enjoy each other’s cultural expressions. That reality was invented, though, in the late 1950s and early 1960s by people who were interviewed before they died and at radio stations that left boxes of memos for us to sort and analyze.

Barbara Sharf is Professor of Communication and teaches courses in health communication, interpretive methods, and narrative inquiry. At the core of her research is an ongoing interest in patient empowerment, improved clinical communication between patients and providers, and the role of culture (both ethno- and popular), particularly in the form of personal and public narratives, in shaping understandings of health and illness. She is currently interested in investigating the role of communication in complementary and alternative health care settings, as well as visual/verbal narratives of health crises and healing depicted in Mexican and Mexican-American retablos.

I study the media’s role in changing or sustaining health behaviors. I would broadly be classified as someone who does media effects research with public health campaigns. Under the media effects umbrella, I work with individual difference variables like sensation seeking and impulsivity as well as with persuasion theory as used in the media. In health campaigns, I largely focus on substance use prevention both with adolescents (specifically, high sensation seeking adolescents) and their parents (authoritarian and permissive parents, in particular). More recently, however, I have worked with campaigns promoting organ donor cards and the prevention of tobacco use. Because of my training, most of my research takes a social scientific approach and data are largely analyzed with quantitative data analytic techniques.

Currently, I am working with Iftekhar and Sammy on a project that uses language expectation theory and terror management theory to evaluate the effects of recent newspaper articles on tissue and organ donation. We will be collecting data this semester. I am working with Antonio La Pastina on an anti-drug ad project and interviewing Hispanic parents of adolescents who live in Bryan.

Richard Street, PhD, is Professor and Head of Communication and Research Professor in Medicine at Texas A&M University. He is also Chief, Division of Health Communication and Decision-Making in the Houston Center for Quality of Care and Utilization Studies, Baylor College of Medicine.

Over the past 20 years, he has developed a program of research examining issues related to health care provider-patient communication, medical outcomes, and strategies for increasing patient involvement in care. During the past 10 years, he also has explored various ways information (e.g., multimedia programs) and telecommunication (e.g., the internet) technologies can be used to enhance health services offered to patients and, very importantly, to activate patients to become more involved in medical decision-making, communicating with their physicians, and self-management of chronic disease.

To address these issues, he takes post-positivist and social constructionist perspectives. Specifically, while communication is dynamic and jointly created by the interactants, it does unfold in some predictable and patterned ways. He examines processes creating, maintaining, or disrupting patterns of medical discourse (the factors affecting provider-patient communication process) as well as the processes affecting the relationship between communication and post-interaction outcomes (e.g., improved health, commitment to treatment, improved self-care). Understanding these issues not only contributes to theory and research in health communication, it also identifies places and processes to target interventions to improve provider-patient communication and enhance health care consumer participation in care.

His methods are quantitative for the most part with some attention to description of case studies exemplifying certain communication processes.

I am primarily interested in how media workers develop and follow the routines—or rituals—needed to produce content for listeners, viewers, and readers. This research sub-discipline often is referred to as “media sociology,” but that addresses only contemporary issues generally explored through latent and manifest content analyses and ethnographies. While I do use those methods to examine “modern” issues, I am equally interested in the historical antecedents of media work routines. I want to understand what other researchers have called the complete “natural history” of media institutions, the people and social movements that created them, and the people who worked within them in the past and do so today. Here are the types of research questions that interest me: What explains the occasions when media workers depart from normative work rules? How has the definition of news changed over time? What explains the change? Can we chart those changes in media artifacts? What do the changes say about our society? Do professionals who work on the border between news and entertainment have more flexible rules? Or, do they just ignore the rules?

I am working on two projects—one alone and the other with Johny Garner, a recent graduate of the Department of Communication’s Ph.D. program. The first uses historical methods to answer questions that other researchers have not systematically addressed. True mass entertainment and news media developed in the last two decades of the 19 th century because of a cluster of technological, economic, and social developments. Those developments produced within a short time a huge, unmet demand for media workers. College-level instruction in journalism did not exist for the most part at this time. Where did the new workers come from? How were they socialized to media work? Or, did their numbers overpower media institutions’ ability to socialize new workers? Did they, in effect, “socialize” media institutions to new work and content rules? The second project uses a manifest content analysis to examine newspaper coverage of the Columbia space shuttle disaster. When the Challenger exploded in 1986, the national media examined its coverage of NASA and the shuttle program and found that reporting had been superficial. A “normative” approach to the stories, including an effort to balance sources, would have revealed the flaws in the shuttle program, preventing that disaster as well as the “news disaster” that preceded it, the media concluded. Dr. Garner and I examined the sources used in the Columbia stories to see if that coverage constituted another “news disaster” for the media. Our study has been reviewed for publication, and we now are revising it.

Christopher Swift’s research concerns itself with the history of rhetoric: primarily in Germany and France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At least since Plato, certain philosophers have sought to produce writings accessible to the public, but not addressed to crowds. They have sought to help others live an ethical life, but not to tell them how to live. In so doing, they have sought to develop new discourses that depart from those associated with the rhetorical tradition. The achievements and difficulties of such writers have had a decisive, if still inadequately understood, impact on what we think of as rhetoric today.

Swift currently writes about Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra and its relationship to contemporary studies of rhetoric. Although scholars often associated Nietzsche with a 20 th century revival of interest in rhetoric, his writings more directly associate themselves with the traditions of philosophers interested in overcoming the classical discipline. Other current projects include a study of French scholarship in the second half of the 20 th century that treats rhetoric only as a historical artifact and concerns itself with developing new disciplines of discourse.

Ian Weber is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University. Dr Weber's research focuses on global media, China's media development, and online social activism. His current research examines online youth protests, digital television development, and mobile technologies in transition in China. Dr. Weber's most recent publications include "Digitizing the dragon: Challenges facing China's broadcasting industry (New Media & Society, 2005), "SARS, youth and online civic participation"(Medi@sia, 2006), and "Internet and self-regulation in China: The cultural logic of controlled commodification" (Media, Culture and Society, 2007). He has published widely in international journals including Journal of Contemporary China, Intercultural Communication, New Media & Society, and Gazette to name a few.