Department of Communication Studies
These digital collections include theses, dissertations, and faculty publications from the Department of Communication Studies. Due to departmental name changes, materials from the following historical departments are also included here: Speech and Theatre Arts; Speech Communication.
Collections in this community
Recent Submissions
-
Overworked and underpaid: Hollywood gatekeeping in assistant labor and discourse
Ubiquitous, yet unseen, exploited assistants' unseen labor hems the fabric of Hollywood and entertainment industries. In this dissertation, I interrogate the unseen cultural discourses of Hollywood that obfuscate the ... -
Theorizing commensality discourses: food truck communication and influence in local culture
Food trucks offer spaces of commensality where people negotiate cultural identity and senses of place though practices, tastes, and performances communicated through enactments of food sharing. In this dissertation, I ... -
"One nation under God?": a call for secular rhetorical criticism
This dissertation explores the need for secular rhetorical criticism, an approach to rhetorical scholarship that centers questions of power, privilege, and marginalization in relation to ir/religious pluralism. I contend ... -
Reckoning with identity: the changing dynamics of television representations in the American South
The American South is a continually understudied and misrepresented region of the United States. Televisual representations of the region typically rely on the Southern Imaginary, a collection of predetermined stereotypes ... -
Choosing love: performances of romance in mobile dating simulation games
With the launch of the Android app store in 2008, mobile gaming has occupied a surging niche in the video game market. While considerable scholarly attention has been paid to video games, with mobile games enjoying a portion ... -
"I am not a bad friend for having boundaries": exploring the need for and creation of support boundaries in friendships
Although research effectively depicts the benefits of social support and support recipient experiences, less scholarship explores discrepancies and challenges in supportive communication. This research study investigates ... -
Listening to difference: the construction of intersectional identity in VALORANT's sound design
As sound studies begins to interface more prominently with communication studies, the majority of research concerns rhetorical implications of vocality and sound's potential for argumentation and advocacy. This thesis ... -
Listening theory story, A: an analysis of key themes, traditions, and actors in a community of practice of international listening theory scholars, 1987-2021
In any field of research, specific theory drives discovery, inquiry, and production of knowledge. Looking at the field of listening research, listening theory can be seen to impact how scholars view results of their studies. ... -
"For the love of all that is queer and holy": exploring the experiences and identity tensions of LGBTQ individuals within Christianity
Historical tensions exist between Christian and LGBTQ communities and LGBTQ people are marginalized within Christianity. The purpose for studying the experiences of LGBTQ people within Christianity is to explicate how this ... -
Productive self-advocacy: how Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar communicate Black sovereignty
Hip-hop culture has been commodified and sold internationally, but it has always been intertwined, intentionally or otherwise, with social change. This thesis seeks to complicate and reimagine the contemporary hip-hop ... -
Leadership, resilience, and sensemaking at Colorado State University during the COVID-19 pandemic
This study examines the crisis communication qualities of crisis leadership, communicative resilience, and enacted sensemaking in the case of Colorado State University's response to COVID-19 in the spring of 2020. The focus ... -
. . . [elipsis]
The ellipsis performs various functions in U.S. culture. It euphemizes, it transgresses, it represents an omission of text, and it occupies a space between words and yet has meaning. For these reasons, the ellipsis is an ... -
Building a Mile High City: theorizing rhetorical infrastructures in Denver's development
This dissertation utilizes multi-methodological practices to showcase rhetoric's role in directing, arranging, and negotiating urban development projects to sculpt a particular, and particularly power-laden urban identity. ... -
Introducing a critical approach to studies of uncertainty: engaging uncertainty with Hispanic adults in Colorado during the COVID-19 health crisis
Existing scholarship on the communicative experience of uncertainty revolves primarily around understanding intrapersonal and interpersonal processes for engaging with uncertainty. After its beginning with Berger and ... -
School nursing in COVID-19: the role of professional organizations in identity management
Identity conflict can leave one feeling frustrated, sad, confused, and breathless with anger. As a school nurse, the fact that a pandemic-inducing respiratory illness led me to feel symptomatic with the weight of my job ... -
Fat-positive worldmaking in the body positive movement: queering, decolonizing, intersecting
This dissertation uses a queer rhetorical approach augmented by a critical/cultural sensibility and autoethnographic performance to examine how body positive activists, influencers, and public figures carve out moments for ... -
Hong Kong's Umbrella and Hard Hat revolutions: toward a theory of the ideology of protest strategies
In this study, I analyzed Hong Kong's 2014 Umbrella Revolution and 2019 Hard Hat Revolution to answer two research questions: (1) What ideologies characterize the protest strategies of Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution and ... -
Supernatural friendships: parasocial relationships and the provisions of social support
Parasocial relationships and social support both have independently rich literatures within the field of communication. However, until this study, parasocial relationship partners had not been considered as social support ... -
Race, sexual orientation, and childbirth: locating identity in the framework of social support
Social support is a growing field in Communication Studies. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have studied the influence of social support on health, but there is a need for more research which considers how identity ... -
Tensions in service-oriented temporary organizations: the emergence and management of tensions in student organizing
Previous communication scholarship has focused on tension as a component of everyday organizing. However, minimal research has explored it in tandem with temporary organizing and servant leadership. This case study explores ...
RSS 1.0