The Warren C. Fairbanks Associate Professor and the Department Chair of the Department of Journalism & Communication | Faculty Bio
Research title: Working in partnership with Ashley Kennard – "Social & political responses to racialized health messages: Attitudinal and public policy support implications of racialized framing of illness"
Collaborator in research: Ashley Kennard
Stage in research: We have designed the study and will be doing an initial test this semester before launching the full study.
(Interview by Barbara Bird, August 7, 2024)
We want to determine whether or not, when folks hear about a disease with images that show various racial identities, whether or not they are moved to support federal funding.
We predict that people would support opioids since they were framed as a white woman problem.
I am excited about this research because historically, this topic is what I've looked at: I've looked at health, disease, and how they are framed as a racial issue. Even exercise, like Zoomba: This is framed as a white woman's physical activity.
We will expose people to public service announcemeents and then give them a survey to complete that indicates their level of support for helping people with each disease. Our study is a "deception study:" We are not explicitly telling participants that the potential public service announcements are racially framed. Instead, we are asking them to give us feedback on font, style, etc.
I'm an outlier. I very much appreciate the training in graduate school, but what I wanted to do has always been slightly off. One of the things I love about being at OWU is that I'm able to define who I am as a scholar in multiple ways.
With my pedagogy collaborator, Dawn Chisebe, one of the ways we emphaize a broader diversity is how we internationalze our curriculum and classrooms. Black and Brown are not a monolith.
We put together workshops, walking folks through iterations of courses we have collaborated on and how we have shifted over the time. Our three primary pedagogical moves are these:
We are writing about and doing workshops on how to internationalze classes, teaching our three pedagogical moves.
More than anything else in terms of content is my health communication course: Black in the U.S. In that course, the singular thing I say to students no matter what the course topic is: show me a social issue in the U.S. that I cannot link to your ZIP code. Because of where you are born, birth location becomes a primary predictor of where or how you can thrive: income shift potential, health
Our instinct in classes is to assume that the "great people" must be those most textbooks show as the "great scholars." But we should question–how does that established list of scholars happen? Who else is missing?
I tell students that this questioning includes how you experience your education and how you should question things in classes, not assume things: for example, don't assume that everything in textbooks is true or the only truth.
The other [way my research connects to my teaching] is this: I'm frank with students about my identity: I came into the health–race research because I had health issues and I had trouble finding physicians who would listen and help me navigate; I had difficulty finding a Black female physician. And I come into healthcare from a collectivist culture: If I'm dealing with a health issue, I don't think of my health issue from an autonomous independent agent. I'm factoring in all those in my collective group and taking the group into account.
I tell all my students: you might read me in a particular way, but I have this very rich background that I'm showing up in. I bring my whole identity into the classroom.
The Warren C. Fairbanks Associate Professor and the Department Chair of the Department of Journalism & Communication