Dissertations in Progress


  • Katherine Anderson ~ Celebrity Advocacy:  There's No Business but Show Business
  • Beth Boser ~ The Rhetorical Practice and Space of Birth
  • Omri Ceren ~ The Non-Epistemic Dimensions of Conspiracy Rhetoric
  • Nien-Tsu (Nancy) Chen ~ Heuristic and Systematic Routes to Decision-Making about Vaccination:  Integrating Trust, Affect and Mass Media Influence into Health Behavior Theories
  • Paulina Chow-White ~ Creativity and the New Urban Imaginary:  Globalization and the (re)Configuration of Space, Governance and Everyday Life
  • Fan Dong ~ Digital Creativity and Innovation in Chinese SNS Industry 
  • Laura Farmer ~ Hurricane Katrina:  Framing Leadership through Communication
  • Laurel Felt ~ Feeling Our Way Through:  Assessing the Impacts of an Original Social and Emotional Learning Curriculum and Dojo, a Biofeedback-Enhanced Video Game for Emotional Regulation Training 
  • Melissa Franke ~ Constraining Stories:  Four Narratives that Limit Options for U.S.-Cuba Relations
  • Ryan Gillespie ~ Morals, Markets and the Public Sphere: A Study of Normative Arguments to Increase Human Organ Supply in the U.S., 1984-2010
  • Carmen Gonzalez ~ Everyday Transnationalism:  A Communication Ecology Approach to Transnational Health
  • Amy Granados ~ Chasing the American Scene:  Casting Directors and Diversity in Film and Television
  • Adam Kahn ~ We're All in this (Video Game) Together:  Using Social Presence to Understand the Emergence of Transactive Memory Systems
  • Charlotte Lapsansky ~ Voice, Participation & Technology in India:  Communication for Development in the Mobile Era
  • Jingfang Liu ~ The Emergence of Green Information Technology (Green IT):  The Interplay of the Formation and Implementation of Green IT Strategy and Possible Green Cultural Changes at IT Organizations
  • Yujung Nam ~ A Unified Model of Online Health Information Sharing, Patient Social Support and Social Networking among Cancer Patients 
  • Russell Newman ~ Dealing with Neoliberalism:  The Paradoxes of Network Neutralities
  • Nina O'Brien ~ Ecological Agglomeration:  Networks in the American Film Industry, 1991-2011
  • Katherine Ognyanova ~ Topical Networks:  Investigating the Issue Agenda of Diverse News Media Outlets
  • Katherine Pieper ~ Social Support in Cambodia:  The Role of Peer Educators in Behavior Change
  • Steven Rafferty ~ Laughing With and At Race:  The Good, Bad, and Ugly of a Symbolic Regime in American Popular Culture
  • Stephen Robertson ~ The Rhetoric of Public Risk Perception and Controversy Surrounding Everyday, Low-level Radiation Technology
  • William Sanders ~ Identity, Trust, and Credibility Online:  Evaluating Contradictory User-Generated Information via the Warranting Principle
  • Adam Symonds ~ At the Game or in the Basement:  Baseball Blogs and Fan Culture
  • Diana Winkelman ~ The 2010 Haiti Network Relief Movement:  A Study in Natural Disaster and Media Intervention
  • Li Xiong ~ The Social Meaning of Sharing and Geocoding:  Features and Social Processes in Online Communities
  • Mei Zhou ~ An Evolving History of Falun Gong