2015 Opening Session: Beyond the Tower – Embracing Opportunities for Creative Education, Engagement and Empowerment.

November 10, 2015 • Las Vegas, NV
Jimmie Manning, Northern Illinois University
Adam C. Earnheardt, Youngstown State University
Andre E. Johnson, Memphis Theological Seminary
Amy K. Kilgard, San Francisco State University
Lisa M. Tillmann, Rollins College

Good Afternoon,

Welcome to NCA 2015, the 101st annual convention of the National Communication Association. This evening we are embracing opportunities to learn more about, I want to say different forms of ways we can share our scholarship. I’m excited about the session, I’m excited about learning how we might get started in such forms of disseminating the very interesting research that we have and ideas that we have, and I’m excited to learn from our panellist’s. My name is Christy Beck and I’m first Vice President of NCA and I am just thrilled that you have taken the time this evening to join us for this session. Without further ado I’m going to turn it over toJimmie Manning who has graciously agreed to chair this evening’s session. Jimmie?

Hello everybody it’s really great to see you all tonight and it is my pleasure to serve as today’s session Chair for Beyond the Tower: Embracing Opportunities for Creative Education, Engagement and Empowerment and I want to start by thanking Christy Beck, not only for planning an amazing conference day one that has been fantastic, but also for putting this session together. I am optimistic that today’s presentation will highlight creative and collaborative ways in which we, as Teachers, Mentors, Researchers, Creators, Artists, Leaders, Community Members and forever Students can embrace opportunities.

Specifically today’s panel will focus on how we as communication scholars can engage an activity beyond traditional outlets and forums. To be certain we have seen a lot of dialogue in the discipline about the value communication scholarship can have for our communities, our homes, our worlds and our personal lives.

This includes discussion in our journals, such as the ‘Does Communication Research make a difference’Forum that appeared in Communication Monographs and the Journal of Applied Communication Research in 2010, special issues of journals including Management Communication Quarterly and Women in Language among others that focus on how we can apply our work, also theHandbook of Applied Communication Research edited by Larry Frey and Kenneth Cissna, book pioneers in the area as well as many other outlets, communication is a practical discipline and we should certainly celebrate that.

We also know that many of us in the communication discipline make engaging scholarship that is serious hard work that often goes unrecognised. This includes documentaries, performances, TED or TED-like talks, academic blogs and more and we do this work on a regular basis. So while we know that people are out there working hard to make communications scholarship accessible and workable for communities, we also know that we don’t always get the opportunity to engage, like we are doing here tonight, in discussion about how we can make our work more effective, more powerful and more known to the world at large. So that’s why we are here tonight.

To that end, four Communication Scholars have graciously agreed to join us to talk about their successes and perhaps some of their failures too, as they have pushed the boundaries of communication education, engagement and empowerment.

During this session, we will hear how these esteemedpanellists started their projects, how such scholarly activity can be accomplished, how it can be sustained, how you can promote work such as this in the academy and how we can make it count in terms of workload and merit reviews.We will also hear how such forms of scholarly activity can enable our discipline to impact others beyond the academy and how such engagement has been valuable and meaningful. This session will also be interactive, so please know that you will have the opportunity to be a part of the discussion later in the session, but more on that later.

First, let’s meet today’s scholars. Dr Andre Johnson serves in the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis. He teachers classes in Rhetoric, Rhetorical Theory and Criticism, African American Communication and Public Address, Race and Religion and along with his academic titles he is currently the Founder and Managing Editor of the Rhetoric Race and Religion blog and recently he just launched a digital humanities archival project called the Henry McNeil Turner Project. A warm welcome for Dr Andre Johnson.

Dr Adam Earnheardt is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communications at Youngstown State University, his research agenda includes Sports Fandom and Social Media, he writes a Sunday column for the Vindicator newspaper in North East Ohio on Social Media, helping readers to make connections between current communication research and their everyday social media use. He has also served as expert source for Social Media and Sports Media related stories on TV and radio as well as popular press publications including parade magazine and wait for it Playboy, a warm welcome for Dr Adam Earnheardt.

Dr Lisa Tillmann is a Professor and Chair of the Critical Media and Cultural Studies program at Rollins College, she devotes her career to infusing activism and social change into her scholarship teaching and service, she authored the books Between Gay and Straight, Understanding Friendship across Sexual Orientation as well as In Solidarity Friendships, Family and Activism beyond Gay and Straight. She has also written and directed three different films and her poem Ode to Academic Labor inspired a music video by the same title. And you must YouTube itif you want to have a really good time. Please welcome Dr Lisa Tillmann.

Finally Dr Amy Kilgard is a Professor of Communication Studies at San Francisco State University. She is a Solo Performer, Director and Performance Artist whose art and scholarship address issues in Interventionist Performance Pedagogy, Collage, Chaos and Performance Methodologies and Performances of Consumerism. Amy is currently the Chair of NCA’s Performance Studies Division. Please welcome Dr Amy Kilgard.

Got to love the performance peeps are always loud.

And so to begin, we will hear a bit about how new media and its potential for pedagogy, particularly blogging and social media, can impact the world and the discipline. Here to talk about his blog Rhetoric, Race and Religion and its larger implications another warm round of applause for Dr Andre Johnson.

Dr Andre Johnson -

Can we just show some love for NCA for having this panel, Christina Beck and her staff and all the people involved. Isn’t it wonderful when we can come together to talk about blogging and social media and a whole lot of things. I am excited about being a part of this wonderful, wonderful panel and I want to try to, there you go, that’s the blog and, if I can scroll down a little bit, lets leave it there, there you go, thank you, there you go, just let you get a look at that a little bit, alright, go back up a little bit.

Well good evening, so honoured again and privileged to be a part of this panel so honoured and privileged that you are out here and I’m sharing this with us and was just thrilled to be able to get the call to do a panel such as this. And if I, I’m not going to really, because we want to try to do, be a little bit different so I am going to try to be a little bit different today, but if I was given title to this little talk for about 10 minutesand I’ve already used 1 minute so 9 minutes left. I want to talk about blogging Rhetoric, Race and Religion, I want to talk about a pedagogy of the blog; a lot of people always ask me hey Dre what’s up with you and that blog, what’s going on? How did you get started? Well back in October 15th to be exact 2011, I started the Rhetoric, Race and Religion blog. I do want to read at least one piece because this is a small piece of that first blog post that happened on October 15th 2011.

‘Welcome to Rhetoric, Race, and Religion, the blog that examines these and other cultural intersections that play a huge importance in our lives. The phrase, “Rhetoric, Race and Religion” encompasses my entire research agenda and pastoral ministry and will be a place to house all of my work, ideas, thoughts and sometimes my laments as I continue to discern God’s call for me in this season of my life. In addition, this site will also be a place where we engage in public debates about theology and how rhetoric shapes and constructs our theological outlook and how it constructs race on top of the theological outlook because theology in and of itself is a rhetorical construction.’

Now I can do a whole talk about that, however much of that has changed over time, R3 blog is much bigger than I could ever, ever imagine, people ask me how long do you, how many hours do you put in, I roughly spend about 10 hours I think on the blog, not just blogging but researching, reading other blogs, heavy Facebooking, heavy tweeting, by the way I meant to say this, my twitter handle @aejohnsonphd got it, @aejohnsonphd. I am on Facebook as well too so, and if you have your cameras out take some pictures and upload them so I can have them because I can’t take pictures of myself. I mean I got the best suit I could out of the dirty clothes to wear today so I want to see. I’m just teasing, but I actually spend about 10 hours, usually early in the morning and then late at night and then sometimes throughout the day working on the blog, then a lot of people ask me why do you do this, what kind of scholarship do you hope to gain out of the blog? Well of course I answer them in 3 major ways, number 1 blogging: actually blogging helps my over all scholarship, I will ask and I do ask scholars to seriously consider blogging, because it helps my overall scholarship. My short blog posts, anywhere between 400-1000 words, are actually structures, are structured in a way that when I go back to revisit and when I want to turn that blog post into a presentation, then that presentation into a journal article and then that journal article maybe into a book or whatever, the structure is pretty much already there. And the second reason that I do it is because blogging is immediate and contemporary. Look at what is going on in the world when we as Comm Scholars can really get involved and engage and with our expertise, but also with our knowledge of certain situations. Mine is focused of course on Rhetoric, Race and Religion but I see the intersections so plainly. We are right now in the midst of dealing with and talking about what happened in Paris, that is very, very important as it relates to how we are going to talk about it and how we are going to construct that, so that’s another reason why I blog. Lastly the reason why I blog and the reason why I think blogging is important, and all of Social Media, is because of the connections one can make. I have met so many scholars, I have met so many people that not only are doing the work I am doing, but also who are interested in doing the work that I am doing as well and we have formed long lasting friendships. I have been working on some joint projects with people I have met on Twitter. First I have met people via the blog. The blog like I said is much bigger now than it was when I first started. I have guest contributors to the blog, I got regular contributors to the blog and here is a shameless plug, if you are interested in blogging for R3 shoot me an email, but I got, we have other people who are contributing to the blog and getting their voice out and getting their ideas out and their thoughts out, graduate students want to comment on the blog. And I should add this a lot of, one the critiques I hear about blogging from Academics is that they don’t want to put something out there that somebody else can maybe pick up and use and kind of credit, the good thing about a blog is it has a date stamp, so when you put it out it’s already there, so if you say ‘hey I did this two years ago and here’s the stamp to prove it’, it’s ok, so that is not a problem at all.

I also want to talk briefly about how this interacts with where I am now. I formerly was at Memphis Theological Seminary, had seven wonderful years there and they embraced the blogging effort. And now I am at the University of Memphis and my Chair is sitting out in the audience and I think she will be just, she is pleased with the blogging effort, isn’t that right?No, on a serious note, one of the reasons why I did move to the University of Memphis is because of my interest in blogging and Social Media and the University of Memphis really sees that as authentic scholarship, authentic engagement with the community and as a University they are trying to do more of that. I fit right into that as well. I think that as far as promotion and tenure and things of that nature, I don’t see any kind of problem with that and I hope that other Departments begin to look at what Professors are doing in the public arena. On the one hand we want to be public and we want to get our name out there, we want our departments to kind of quote, unquote, shine, but we also have to not penalise scholars who are engaged in good critical work and who can come back and can then write those articles and then write those books that reflect that work which I am attempting to do now. And lastly, I want to talk about some of the things that we are pretty much known for on the blog. One of the things that I am proud of and pleased about is the way that we collect what we call our R3 readers. If you follow the blog you know that anytime a real major incident happens what we try to do is collect all of the opinion pieces and put them under a title and a reader and what I have found is that many scholars, many Professors use that material in classrooms. I get emails and a lot of them are thanking me for doing that. Also out of the blog, we are talking about scholarship right, out of the blog I am pleased to announce that through Lexington books, I am the series Editor of the Rhetoric, Race and Religion book series, so, give it up, they too saw merit into what we are trying to do and said that that was a good thing that we are doing so hopefully in 2016 when we convene in Philadelphia I will be able to have panels centred around a couple of books that have been published in the R3 book series. And that’s one of the things we really want to do, we want to promote Professors’ works and Scholarship and trying to get it out there. Because the last thing, a lot of people do not have, and we already know this, do not have the benefit of having the opportunity rather to read our scholarship a lot of times, but with a blog, with Twitter, with Facebook, with your own pages you can really help and impact a lot of people who probably would never read a journal article but will read the ideas that the journal article is promoting. And I do believe it is very, very helpful especially as it relates to graduate schools, people who want to get involved into our discipline, people who want to know what is really going on as it relates to Comms Studies. So I am just honoured and privilegedagain to be here to talk a little bit about the blog. I will be here even after the panel if you want to ask questions, I am looking forward to some questions and answers in the question and answers period. But thank you again for this opportunity to talk about something that I really, really believe in, that I really, really am excited about, thank you.

Thank you so much Dr Johnson for getting us started off right. Next stop, we take a look at media, both new and traditional with Dr Adam Earnheardt.

Dr Adam Earnheardt -

So while I’m putting this PowerPoint up here, oh this is yours, wrong one, alright. Funny story about the Playboy thing, so imagine this, I’m not a subscriber not a reader and one of my colleagues in the Criminal Justice programme walks across the campus one day and he says ‘I saw you in Playboy!’, oh thanks that’s great you know. But yes, so it’s like my wife says, we were talking about embracing opportunities, I’ve never passed up on an opportunity so, that was one of them so there you go. Speaking of which though, I did learn a lesson and I teach public speaking among other things and I tell my students when you are doing your introduction to a speech don’t be negative, try not to be negative. So I’m going to start my speech by telling you, and it’s funny we’re talking about embracing opportunities and I’m starting with this very, very important word,and it was hard for me to learn. My beautiful wife, Dr Mary Beth Earnheardt, will be the first to tell you that, you know, I’m not the kind to practice what I preach so I say, you know, do as I say not as I used to do and it got so, to be that. So when I was embracing all of these opportunities that it caused me a lot of harm professionally and personally because I was taking on too much, I was letting people down and whenever it came to fruition was when I became Department Chair. How many Department Chairs or recovering Department Chairs… So you know what I mean, one of the very first things that you sacrifice as Department Chair is scholarship and that was my love, I loved to write, I loved to research and so that was one of the very first things to go. And it took some time to figure out that there are other things that I could look at in terms of opportunities that maybe didn’t include the time-sensitive stuff that I still enjoyed.