East Tennessee State University

Faculty Member, Department of Communication

College of Arts and Sciences

About

My communication research focuses on identity in various forms. For example, my identity and organizational communication research examines power, gender, and the narrative sensemaking processes of various organizational stakeholders, including employees, corporate stockholders, and volunteers at a start-up non-profit organization.

Similarly, I study the philosophy of proto-existentiualist, Soren Kierkegaard and the application of his philosophical project in the communication discipline, particularly as it applied to identity formation and dialogue.

I use qualitative methods including narrative, in-depth interviewing, ethnography, and discourse analysis. Depending on the problem investigated, my research uses interpretive, critical, and postmodernist epistemological approaches.

Lastly - and just for fun - I play around in media studies, tackling topics like media ecology and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Whedonverse - where I still manage to examine identity.

I am an Assistant Professor at East Tennessee State University. I teach organizational communication, group communication, business and professional communication, and communication and leadership.

Among my favorite 'academic' authors are Bud Goodall, Bob Krizek, Art Bochner, Tony Adams. Elissa Foster, Eric Eisenberg, Sarah Jane Tracy, Karen Lee Ashcraft, Chris Poulos, and Carolyn Ellis.

Among the philosophers I admire are Camus, Heidegger, Anselm, Guignon and Foucault.

Love my life.

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