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My research aims to empower people to achieve their fullest potential in a sustainable manner while embracing and celebrating their social identities. My research is positioned at the intersection of corporate social advocacy, critical public relations, corporate social responsibility/sustainability, and culture.
My current research focuses on situations where brand and corporate activism, environmental conservation, and socioeconomic development collide with intersectional social justice issues such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, citizenship, and other axes of inequality and oppression.
My doctoral dissertation is a postmodern analysis of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) activism within the non-Western socioeconomic context of Ghana. I have authored publications on communication, public relations, sales, and marketing communications.
I have presented various research projects at major international communication conferences, and published in reputable communication journals.
Explore some of my books, book chapter contributions, journal articles, dissertations, theses, and long essays here.
This paper shares how a mentoring assignment resulted in numerous successes and subsequently grew into a lifelong relationship between the faculty mentor and faculty mentee. A loosely structured mentoring program was turned into a mutually beneficial relationship based on spontaneity, trust, and learning that has resulted in numerous collaborations, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary research, and a deep and lasting friendship. This is a qualitative case study of a one-on-one cross-race faculty mentoring relationship at Drake University, a small-to-medium-sized Midwestern liberal arts university located in Des Moines, Iowa. Using interviews, self-reflection, and a chronicling of events, this case study tells a story of how to create a successful and productive mentoring relationship. The findings suggest that successful mentoring is built on mutual respect, intentionality, and an established set of goals between the two parties. It requires both parties to be open and transparent, share what they hope to gain, and make a serious commitment to achieve the desired results. It also requires a mix of structure, informality, and a willingness to share one’s vulnerabilities, hopes, and fears. When both parties benefit through reciprocal learning and professional gains, the relationship becomes stronger and more gratifying. Also discussed are the value of context and some best practices for establishing a successful mentee-mentor relationship that will result in a win-win partnership.
At Drake University, Public Relations Writing is the second course required of all PR majors in a six-course sequence, and it provides an opportunity for students to develop the writing and editing skills necessary to succeed in a public relations career. Students learn to think critically about current events and how they relate to PR practice. Some coursework is completed on behalf of a community partner while much more is created on behalf of a dream employer of their choice. This allows students to customize their writing portfolios, while often feeling increased commitment to creating quality content. The best part? Each student’s final work is shared by their professor with their dream employer, providing an important professional connection that often leads to job shadows, internships and even future employment.
Climate crisis, fueled by dominant social, political and economic structures, causes a rift in the Earth’s metabolism. In the built environment, where people live and work, social-ecological communities, such as ecovillages and cohousing, model and pursue alternative, interconnected relations with nature. This study examines five social-ecological communities in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and their use of strategic communication to pursue structural change. Long interviews identified three themes and eight sub-themes through which community members influence the mainstream that surrounds them and enrich their own membership and infrastructure. This study demonstrates that postmodern approaches to strategic communication active on the local level, while in tension with modernist approaches, provide an effective means to respond to climate crisis in the built environment.
This study examined the effects of emotions on risk concerns and behavior change among sex workers in Zambia. The aim was to investigate which health communication ad campaigns elicit emotions that lead to behavior change. Two types of HIV/AIDS ads were used for the analysis: Those focusing on eradicating the scourge by evoking negative emotions versus those aimed at fighting stigma with positive messages. Findings suggest that participants exposed to negatively framed ad campaigns were more likely to quit their sex working profession at follow-up than those exposed to ads designed to fight social stigma. In other words, negatively framed ad campaigns that invoked fear about HIV/AIDS were more likely to encourage behavior change among female sex workers in Zambia. The study speaks to the issue of risk versus crisis communication as they relate to how the Global North and South respond to stigma.
Trendwatchers have spotted some seismic shifts in relations between business and politics. Particularly, Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) are increasingly weighing in on greater good issues. Although a global phenomenon, current CEO activism scholarship reflects a Western focus; an ideological bias for modernist perspectives; a preponderance of White male CEO voices, and the relative elision of female activist CEOs. While, generally, no empirically-based typology of the sociopolitical issues that matter to activist CEOs exists, the specific range of causes of particular concern to non-Western CEO activists is neatly absent. This paper addresses all of these concerns, offering an inquiry into the emerging CEO activism phenomenon in the Ghanaian non-Western sociocultural milieu. Data collection entailed three separate rounds of fieldwork that saw long interviews with a corps of 24 self-identified informants, featuring an even split of men and women activist CEOs. The hermeneutic phenomenological theme-based approach guided data analysis. Following extant brand activism models, a typology of six clusters of CEO activism issues is offered that highlights the weightier matters of sociocultural activism, environmental activism, business/workplace activism, political activism, legal activism, and economic activism. Sociocultural issues include Ghana’s fight against COVID-19, where activist CEOs pooled resources to construct and equip a new multimillion dollar 100-bed infectious diseases hospital facility, embarked on risk communication campaigns, donated critical health supplies, funded the screening and testing of employees, provided food and essential supplies to vulnerable groups, and called out the government for lapses in the management of this health crisis. Besides internationalizing CEO activism studies for the strategic communications, leadership, business ethics and responsible management fields, the results suggest the need to consider the perspectives of CEO activists in non- Western societies. This paper contributes mainly to current discussions in CEO activism (aka corporate social advocacy) and brand activism. It contributes to other theoretical and conceptual streams, including covenantal notions of public relations, Caritas, Ubuntu Philosophy, Africapitalism, and postmodern values in strategic communication. This paper contributes to the upper echelon perspective; insider activism; sustainability transitions; and current discussions concerning how to address issues of diversity, equity, inclusivity, and social justice in the public relations literature. Policy implications are laid out, and areas for future research are indicated.
Against the backdrop of strident discussions about the contemporary value of public relations (PR), Public Relations Capitalism: Promotional Culture, Publics and Commercial Democracy is a significant book, the publication of which could not have come at a more opportune time. From the outset, the author advocates for a nuanced assessment of the relevance of PR and promotional culture. With the perceived emergence of commercial democracy within neoliberal capitalism, a case is made for a new and pivotal role for PR and cognate promotional practices—the function of a “social broker.” Such a thought-provoking book could only have come from Anne M. Cronin (a Reader in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University, United Kingdom). The author believes that efforts at an interpretive understanding of citizens’ dissatisfactions with conventional democracy should entail a reevaluation of the evolving significance of PR and promotional culture, particularly in their ability to interface with the very foundations of social and political organization and stability. Cronin observes that a new relationship is being forged between political culture and commercial culture that is mediated by PR and other promotional industries. This shifts the terrain of politics and creates a form of commercial democracy that rearticulates public engagement and social values. (pp. 1–2)
2507 University Ave Des Moines, IA 50311
Office: Meredith 110