COMMUNICATION CORNER

2007-06

Work with ICIC: For the past eight years I have collaborated with the Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication (ICIC). Our first interdisciplinary research project was the study of fundraising discourse (supported by grants from the IU Center on Philanthropy).
This collaboration resulted in numerous publications, workshops on effective fundraising strategies presented to fundraisers, and joint
conferences between scholars and fundraising practitioners. In 2006, ICIC received grants from the International Development Fund and the IU European Center of Excellence to conduct interdisciplinary and intercultural research on patient health literacy and medical labels.
I find myself a member, once again, of an exciting interdisciplinary research team, which includes faculty from the IU School of Medicine, the IU School of Law, the Butler University School of Pharmacy, and the School of Liberal Arts. The specific project we're working with is studying the ways in which people with diabetes use information to manage their health care.

Arts & Humanities grant: This past year, I received a New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities grant to pursue another research interest of mine. The title of the project is "And Justice for All?: A Thematic Analysis of Representations of Legal Discourse on Popular Television Programs in the United States and Germany."

From Perry Mason to Judging Amy to People’s Court, representations of courtroom interaction have long been a staple of American television. While Amy Gray and Judge Judy may entertain us, they also serve a didactic function, depicting and scripting expectations about legal discourse. Furthermore, with the increasing globalization of media genres, court television programming has been exported around the world.

This project will explore how these television programs produce meaning and represent reality, focusing specifically on a multi-cultural comparison of the images of justice they communicate. In the first phase of the project, the focus will be on a comparison of the United States and Germany. A sampling of programs that are preferred as "nonfictional" depictions of courtroom interaction in the United States (i.e., Judge Judy, Judge Joe Brown and Divorce Court) and Germany (i.e., Richter Alexander Holt, Jugendgericht, and Richterin Barbara Salesch) will be DVD-recorded for analysis. Then, using thematic content analysis, the programs will be analyzed. Some of the thematic categories to be indexed are: What assumptions about justice are communicated in these programs? What rules are depicted as governing courtroom interaction? What roles are represented in the courtroom (i.e., witness, defendant, prosecutor, defense attorney, judge, etc.), and what role expectations are constructed for each? What expectations about how conflicts should be resolved in courtrooms are communicated in these programs? After the programs from each country are coded, the collaborators will meet to conduct cross-country, comparative analyses.
Specifically, the ways in which each culture adopts the generic form (hybridization) while simultaneously adapting it to communicate the specific elements of the culture’s legal discourse (indigenization) will be highlighted. This project has already grown, and one of our graduate students, Faye Liu, is collaborating with us on a proposed book chapter that will compare values that undergird understandings of justice in the US, Germany and China.

Teaching: I taught over 90 students last semester. One of the things I enjoyed doing last year related to teaching was developing the online intercultural communication class. The neat thing about that class is as students are learning about intercultural communication online, they can be communicating with people from all over the world using the internet. For example, one of the assignments I included in the class was an "online interview," where students have a period of time to chat with people from other countries about the ways communication in business or school or health care is different in their culture. Last summer, which was the first time I taught the class, students had a chance to "interview" people from Finland, Germany, and Russia.