Notes on Contributors
Naved Bakali
is an Assistant Professor of Education at the American University in Dubai. Naved also serves as a non-resident Research Fellow with Trends Research and Advisory; he is a Senior Fellow at Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research; and a Research Affiliate with the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society. He has published extensively in the fields of Islamophobia Studies, critical approaches to countering violent extremism, and Muslim youth identity in the post 9/11 context. He is the author of Islamophobia: Understanding Anti-Muslim Racism through the Lived Experiences of Muslim Youth, published by Sense.
Amy Burt
is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication at Georgia College in Milledgeville. Her research interests involve community-based performance, narrative, faith, and identity. She has directed, acted, and sang in a variety of venues throughout middle Georgia. Her writings can be found in Text and Performance Quarterly, Liminalities, and Women in Language. She was honored to be awarded the Southern States Communication Association Performance Studies Scholar of the Year in 2016.
Jonathan L. Crane,
PhD (1991), University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at UNC Charlotte. He studies culture, media and communication and is co-author of End of Life Communication: Stories from the Dead Zone (Routledge, 2019).
Kimberly Dark
is a writer, professor and raconteur, working to reveal the hidden architecture of everyday life so that we can reclaim our power as social creators. She’s the author of Fat, Pretty and Soon to be Old (AK Press, 2019), The Daddies (Brill | Sense, 2018) and Love and Errors (Puna Press, 2018). Her essays, stories and poetry are widely published in academic and popular online publications alike. Dark teaches Sociology at Cal State San Marcos and Writing/Arts at Cal State Summer Arts.
Christine Salkin Davis,
PhD (University of South Florida, 2005), is Professor in the Communication Studies Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She studies end of life communication in the contexts of family, culture, and power. She is author of Death: The Beginning of a Relationship (Hampton Press, 2010) and co-author of Talking through Death: Communicating about Death in Interpersonal, Mediated, and Cultural Contexts (Routledge, 2018); and End of Life Communication: Stories from the Dead Zone (Routledge, 2019).
Ana X. de la Serna
is Assistant Professor at Cal State Dominguez Hills. Ana obtained her PhD in Communication from the University of Kentucky and her Master’s degree from Tec de Monterrey in Mexico City. Prior to her doctoral studies, Ana worked as a photojournalist and in media relations. Ana’s research interests are in intercultural communication and health contexts. In this particular case, she presents the experience of international graduate students as they navigate the transition to the Trump presidency. This experience came with very specific challenges and uncertainty.
Jennifer L. Erdely,
PhD, is an Associate Professor of Communication in the Brailsford College of Arts and Sciences and Prairie View A&M University where she teaches classes in performance studies, ethnography, activism, and documentary criticism and methods. She has a PhD in Communication Studies from Louisiana State University. As a scholar who employs qualitative methods, Dr. Erdely centers the individual, their body, and their stories as the basis of her work. Lived experiences serve as a framework for understanding phenomena of the human experience. Specifically, her published research has employed ethnographic and autoethnographic methods. Through a method of ethnographic touring, she has explored storytelling, fandom, trauma, altruism, and pilgrimage. Her upcoming project utilizes performance, ethnographic, and autoethnographic inquiry to explore narratives of chronic pain, empathy, and decision-making.
Diane Forbes Berthoud
(PhD, Howard University) is an Assistant Vice Chancellor at the University of California, San Diego, affiliate faculty of George Washington University, and faculty emeritus for the RISE Urban Leadership Institute in California. Diane’s research focuses on gendered, raced, and intersectional processes of organizing, with particular attention to the experiences of Black women and other women of color. She has presented her work at national and international conferences and published in academic journals such as Management Communication Quarterly and the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication. Her most recent work appears in the International Leadership Association book series, Women and Leadership: Research, Theory, and Practice, and Race, Work, & Leadership: New Perspectives on the Black Experience (2019), published by Harvard University Press.
Stacy Holman Jones
is a Professor in the Centre for Theatre and Performance. Her research focuses broadly on performance as a socially, culturally, and politically resistive and transformative activity. Over the course of a 20-year career, she has developed an international reputation for leading the development of performance, feminist and cultural studies research, gender and sexualities studies and innovative and critical arts-based methodologies. Her performance-based and narrative research spans cultural critique and social inclusion, education and resilience building, and enhancing health and well-being among minoritarian cultures and communities. She is recognized for a collaborative and impact-focused research program that integrates theory and creative practice as a means of critique and transforming lives, relationships, ways of living, and communities.
Billy Huff
is a lecturer in the Department of Communication at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is also a researcher with the Unit for Institutional Change and Social Justice at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein South Africa.
Sonia R. Ivancic
is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Florida. She specializes in Organizational and Health Communication and explores the politics and possibilities of creating social change. Dr. Ivancic asks questions about how we organize around embodied difference and analyzes discourses about work, identity, health, food, and the body.
Robyn R. Jardine
is a licensed marriage and family therapist supervisor, licensed professional counselor, AAMFT Approved Supervisor, and owns Life Solutions Counseling and Family Therapy. As a social justice therapist, her scholarship focuses on approaches for dismantling oppressive social systems/structures, and illuminating the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality, and social equality. Her current work is focused on the generational impact of white supremacy and the responsibility of white/Caucasian Americans using their privilege to systemically change and create equitable living systems. She has applied these concepts in a variety of clinical and higher education settings regarding race relationships, inclusion/diversity, student success/retention for marginalized and underrepresented students, effective parenting practices, family/intimate partner violence, and Safe Conversations.
Eun Young Lee
(Bowling Green State University, PhD) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Central Washington University. Her scholarship lies in intersections between Critical Intercultural Communication and Rhetorical Studies. Her research interests include the rhetoricity of place and space, representations of culture on mass media and in popular culture, postcolonialism, and politics in globalization. Currently, she is working on immigration discourses and media representations of (im)migrants primarily focusing on the US contexts.
Hadia Mubarak
iis an Assistant Professor of Religion at Queens University of Charlotte. She previously taught Religious Studies at Guilford College, Davidson College and UNCC. As a former fellow at the Research Institute in the Humanities (2017–2018) at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), she wrote her forthcoming book with Oxford University Press on women and gender in modern Qur’anic commentaries. Mubarak completed her PhD in Islamic Studies from Georgetown University, where she specialized in modern and classical Qur’anic exegesis, modern Islamic movements, and gender reform in the modern Muslim world. Mubarak lives with her husband and two children in Charlotte, NC.
Kristen E. Okamoto
is an Assistant Professor of Health Communication at Clemson University in the Department of Communication. She specializes in the use of ethnographic methods to understand the role of cultural discourses in shaping the ways we think about, and react to, the vulnerable body. Okamoto’s prior work has examined diverse sites of engagement including food auctions, running groups, and group fitness classes. Adopting a narrative approach, Dr. Okamoto is interested in asking how and in under what conditions counter-narratives can serve to reimagine or articulate alternative possibilities.
Bethany Simmons
is a licensed marriage and family therapist, licensed professional counselor, AAMFT Approved Supervisor, an Associate Professor, Program Director and former Director of Clinical Training at California Lutheran University’s M.S. Counseling Psychology-MFT Program. Her current scholarship applies systemic/cybernetic theory to training and supervision, as well as broader social/political/cultural contexts to understand and address issues around social responsibility, power, privilege, cultural diversity and mental health practices, particularly with oppressed, marginalized and vulnerable populations. Her clinical work spans diverse settings working with underserved and marginalized populations including adult and juvenile inpatient psychiatric hospitals, intensive outpatient programs and private practice.
Jillian A. Tullis,
PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of San Diego. Her teaching and research interests focus on health communication, specifically communication about dying and death in and outside of healthcare settings. Tullis’ scholarship uses qualitative methods to study such topics as hospice team communication, tumor boards, spirituality, dying, death, quality of life, and a “good death.” Jillian has a well-loved Velcro dog at home named Rouxbee who is a constant source of much needed levity.