1st academic conference presentation is done!

This weekend, I traveled to Texas A&M in College Station, TX for the 2023 Communicating Diversity Student Conference. It was a great opportunity to connect with other students focusing on equity and communications, and I did my first presentation at an academic conference based on the work I’ve been doing as a Ph.D. student!

My presentation was titled “Demonstrating framing choices as ‘relevant and real’: A content analysis of the diversity rhetoric used by Fortune 500 companies.” It is the start of research that developed from my Quantitative Analysis class.

The full project is a work in progress, but it focuses on the organizational diversity cases and definitions of diversity put forward by Fortune 500 companies when discussing their diversity initiatives. I paired this content analysis with research about the consequences of business-centric framing as part of my effort to discuss the need for communicators to understand the subjective choices they make daily at work. We must remember there is significance to the words and frames we select, and we must seek to understand how they are understood by those we are communicating to and about.

My slides are available on Google Drive. NOTE: The findings included are from a first attempt at doing the classification. I still have a lot of work to do before they could be considered official.

“Dependence on the business case risks reducing people to resources, limits the possibilities for altering human interaction, and reinforces identity hierarchies.”

Mease, J. J. (2012). Reconsidering consultants’ strategic use of the business case for diversity. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 40(4), 384–402.