Programs › Knoxville, TN
Studies telecommunications and media law and policy, internet governance, digital privacy, and international communications regulation, informed by government and industry advisory work.
Studies advertising and societal issues, including advertising to children, food and beverage marketing, parental responses, and social media and influencer marketing.
Studies organization-public relationships and engagement, nonprofit public relations and fundraising, social movements, and strategic use of social and digital media.
Studies media management and economics, including media markets, ownership, strategic competition, linguistic market segmentation, and audience analytics and measurement.
Studies health and crisis communication and public health campaigns, including interventions addressing the opioid epidemic in rural Appalachia.
Studies how internet technologies affect journalism and group formation, and produces documentary films through the university's media center.
Studies advertising and society issues, advocacy advertising, account planning, and advertising agency practice, including health-related advertising.
Studies television news gatekeeping and connections between media and materialistic values, with additional interests in political communication and media ethics.
Studies photojournalism history, newspaper design, and typography, and produces documentary photography such as portraits of Holocaust survivors.
Studies how people maintain relationships and manage closeness and distance, and how teacher communication shapes student engagement and learning, including scale development.
Studies digital propaganda, disinformation, and digital activism, including media influence in former Soviet countries, along with diversity in U.S. media and national identity in press coverage.
Studies communication in teaching and learning, social media and new technologies, and interpersonal relationships.
Studies interpersonal and health communication in clinical and community settings, such as cancer survivorship, oncology teamwork, nurse-physician interaction, and farmer suicide.
Writes cultural histories of the U.S. press, examining sports journalism, political campaigns, collective memory, and the construction of race, gender, and class.
Uses feminist approaches to examine sports media and culture, including workplace diversity and ethics, discourses of gender and sexuality, and audience meaning-making.
Studies how family communication patterns and age-related talk predict older adults' successful aging and health, drawing on communication accommodation and affection exchange theories.
Studies persuasion, opinion leaders and social media influencers, and how social media affects close relationships, often using meta-analysis.
Studies stigma and supportive communication in interpersonal relationships, including how romantic couples cope with opioid use disorder, plus community work on the opioid crisis in rural Tennessee.
Studies instructional communication in higher education classrooms, including instructional assessment, oral communication skill development, policies, and scale development.
Examines gender, race, and diversity in the electronic and sports media industry through feminist and critical cultural lenses, focusing on women sportscasters and Black women newscasters.
Develops and tests social influence theory, modeling what makes people influential and how persuasion works in interpersonal and small-group settings, with expertise in measurement.
Studies multicultural advertising and prosocial strategic communication around LGBTQ issues, race, health disparities, and brand activism, using quantitative and qualitative methods.
Studies messaging, identity, and culture in advocacy, corporate, political, and public diplomacy campaigns, specializing in ethnic public relations.
Studies how social media shapes political engagement, activism, incivility, and privacy perceptions, with attention to marginalized communities, the MENA region, and AI.
Studies risk communication, issues management, and crisis communication, focusing on chemical manufacturing, national security, and community right-to-know issues.
Studies relational issues in groups and organizations, such as conflict, emotion, and relationship building, in natural contexts like family farms and online support groups.
Studies social influence and cognition in sustainability campaigns, green advertising, social media, and influencer and viral marketing.
Studies relationships in organizations, such as leadership, mentoring, and friendship, faculty-student communication, and how culture and social identities shape communication.
Studies how interpersonal conflict and difficult dialogues affect well-being across relationships, organizations, and classrooms, and translates findings into training and dialogue facilitation.
Studies community-based crisis and risk communication and how social identities shape organization-public relationships, using qualitative and quantitative methods.
Studies strategic political campaign messaging and political image repair and their effects on citizens, at the intersection of public relations and political communication.
Studies organizational communication in nonprofit and religious institutions, including organizational culture, identity, survival, and member abuse.
Studies organizational communication, with a teaching and professional background in leadership, crisis communication, and training and development.
Uses quantitative methods to study how crises, CSR, and corporate social advocacy spill over to other organizations and industries in for-profit and nonprofit sectors.
Studies how people communicate about close relationship stressors such as jealousy and break-ups, focusing on technology affordances, using surveys, experiments, content analysis, and interviews.
Studies consumer information processing, ad clutter and message competition, and policy frameworks for digital advertising, using qualitative and quantitative methods.
Studies global public relations and transnationalism through qualitative research on migration, NGOs, and inclusive communication with marginalized publics.
Studies corporate social responsibility and irresponsibility from an internal communication perspective, emphasizing employees as co-creators, using quantitative and qualitative methods.
Studies how brands can use pro-environmental and socially responsible advertising, social marketing, and media effects on health and prosocial consumer behavior.
Studies consumer responses to advertising on emerging platforms, including virtual influencers, mixed reality, sonic branding, streaming services, and product placement.
Studies internal and leadership communication and corporate purpose, examining employee-organization relationships and purpose-driven public relations with mixed methods.
Studies platform governance and content moderation, digital journalism, political influencers, and the spread of false and misleading information on social media.
Studies the intersections of sports, media, and gender, focusing on representation and self-representation of women athletes, and college athlete branding and NIL storytelling.
Studies how communication enables organizing in loosely structured collectives, such as recreation, volunteer, and disaster-response groups, using interviews, observation, and photo-elicitation.
Studies science and risk communication in algorithmically curated information environments, using computational methods, surveys, experiments, and qualitative methods.