Accomplishments: Department of Communication Studies

Assistant professor Rebecca Rice (Communication Studies) received a top paper award for her paper, "How will Climate Change Change Organizing? An Exploratory Study of How Emergency Organizations Frame Climate Change," from the Western States Communication Conference. 
Rebecca Rice (Communication Studies) published the article, “Constituting absence as reliability: The case of COVID-19 response networks,” in Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management.
A new edition of a well-known undergraduate textbook in Denmark titled, "Retorik: Teori og Praksis," [Rhetoric: Theory & Practice] has been published with a chapter dedicated to Visual Rhetoric written by David R. Gruber (Communication Studies). The book was edited by Charlotte Jorgensen and Lisa Villadsen and will be widely used across…
Emma Frances Bloomfield (Communication Studies) and co-author Samantha Senda-Cook (Creighton University) won the 2023 Oravec Journal Article Award in Environmental Communication for their article titled, "Building Coalitions from Shared Pieties: Polyvocal Religious Environmentalism at the Asian Rural Institute," which was published in the …
Emma Frances Bloomfield (Communication Studies) has been awarded the Early Career Award by the Rhetoric and Community Theory Division of the National Communication Association. The award honors a current member of the division who has established an innovative and robust research project within eight years of having earned the Ph.D. degree…
David R. Gruber (Communication Studies) recently published an article titled, "Toward a Rhetorical Theory of the Face: Algorithmic Inequalities and Biometric Masks as Material Protest." The article draws on rhetorical concepts and new materialist theory to think ecologically about the face and its role in communication. Despite the development of…
Emma Frances Bloomfield (Communication Studies) and Sheila Bock (Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies) co-authored the lead chapter in the edited volume, Wait Five Minutes: Weatherlore in the Twenty-First Century (University Press of Mississippi, 2023). Combining rhetorical analysis with folklore studies, their chapter, "…
David R. Gruber (Communication Studies) has published a book chapter titled, "Sniff the Air and Settle In: Bullshit, Rhetorical Listening, and the Copenhagen School's Approach to Despicable Nonsense." The chapter reviews existing work on the rhetoric of "bullshitting" and argues that we do yet not have a very good answer regarding what to do about…
Emma Frances Bloomfield (Communication Studies) and Curtis Chamblee (51ԹϺ Communication Studies MA) have published an article titled, "Rhetorical fractals: An Afrocentric analysis of #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd," in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. The article develops the concept of "rhetorical fractals" to trace public responses to…
Tara McManus (Communication Studies) published the article, "The moderating effects of goals and plans on received support during emerging adults’ conversations with friends," in Communication Quarterly. The study found that when seeking tangible support (such as asking for money or help with chores or other tasks) from friends, identifying…
Emma Frances Bloomfield and Stephanie S. Willes (both Communication Studies) have published an article titled, "Religious Masking and the Rhetorical Strategies of Digital Anti-Vaccination Churches," in the Western Journal of Communication. The article traces the digital rhetoric of "anti-vaccination churches," which are groups that adopt the…
Emma Frances Bloomfield (Communication Studies) and Nick Paliewicz (University of Louisville) published a paper, "Of Markets, Masks, and (White) Men: Mimetic Performances of Parasitic Publicity During the COVID-19 Pandemic," in Women's Studies in Communication. The paper argues that the anti-masking and anti-vaccination subreddit community known…