Photo on Pexel by Tara Winstead
Reading time: 7 minutes
This blog is the second part of the reflection I’ve done about who I am as a communicator and researcher.
Last spring, I officially hit an achievement I had not expected for most of my life: I completed my first year in a Ph.D. program. As I’ve shared, this was not something I had previously aspired to do; it emerged, rather from questions and frustrations I had throughout my career and Strategic Communication MA about the need for professional communicators to think more deeply about out ethical responsibilities.
Making the transition from Sandra Boone (professional communicator) to Sandra Boone ( researcher/scholar/graduate employee) was one of the many challenges I experienced during my first year. Navigating Ph.D. programs is complex for people of any age, but doing a program focused on a field that I have worked in for 15 years came with its own complexity—particularly when I view the work very differently than many public relations scholars and, most definitely, the many critics who would look at me with suspicion/disinterest when I state my area of focus is “public relations” or “the work of professional communications.”
That definition is the topic of another blog. Here, I want to introduce Sandra Boone, the researcher.
Beginning accountability
This is an introduction I wrote for a paper, and I am posting it publicly as an act of accountability. This is a strong summary of the spirit and motivations for my work that I never want to lose—even if, as stated by a teacher, academic practice/training will force changes in my execution (i.e. while I strongly believe in the reasoning for why I want to write the way I discuss, there are limits to what will be accepted within academia, and while I view pushing back on these limits as being part of my form of scholar-activism, I am not to the point in my academic career where I get to ignore them entirely).[1]
I also fully acknowledge that the stress of graduate school coupled with the limited avenues for funding/publication creates a constant temptation to change my focus to something more mainstream. I will also be the first to admit that these emotions have turned the volume up to max for the voice in my head fueled by a lifetime of privilege that hears the worry I write about below and says, “Oh, just quit this worrying. You must know by now that you are one of the good ones.” (My answer is shown in my constant use of phrases like “strive” and “seeks to” — I know I can only hope as I can, and will, fail at any second.)
Introductory note regarding researcher positionality
As I will discuss in this paper, my work is driven by a belief that public relations practitioners must critically consider how their positionality, privilege, and power shape every part of their work (see Walton et al., 2019; Jones et al., 2016). Therefore, as a scholar, I do not seek to hide my opinions or the significance of my identity behind a pretense of objectivity or academic conventions. I freely write about my thoughts and motivations for examining issues as I believe not doing so would be a disingenuous continuation of hiding opinions as “‘common sense’ assumptions” (Fairclough, 1989, p. 2). Additionally, I use first-person language as it forces me to continually engage “in a self-reflective and honest assessment” (Esposito, 2023, p. 9) of how I have participated in the types of actions and systems I examine due to my identity as a communicator, a white cisgender woman, a person who does not have a disability, a monolingual English speaker, and an American citizen.[2]
My research is based on questions I had throughout my career as a professional communicator about the way I and other communicators act/think (including recognition of some of the mistakes I have made), and it is informed by frustrations I had while earning a Strategic Communication MA strongly focused on strategies and tactics. Additionally, as I am always writing with the hopes of encouraging other practitioners to critically examine their practices (along with the educators we[3] turn to for further education and training), I firmly insist that my work both poses critical questions and suggests answers for application. This further causes the need for examples and rationale based on my experiences, since, while I have found critical scholars whose work I appreciate, I have not found ones who fully bridge the divide between functionalist and critical scholarship in ways that match my motivations and thinking.[4]
I freely admit that I am concerned that these are statements of naivety and/or hubris that come from being 1) a new Ph.D. student coming from a professional background, and 2) a white academic focusing on social justice and equity concerns. I continually question whether I am engaging topics I should not every time I read scholars of color and queer scholars who conceptualize ideas and dialogues in ways I never would have considered due to being a white person who has firmly internalized white supremacy. I also cannot decide whether/how it is appropriate for me to incorporate those ideas into my work when they firmly change my thinking and approach (even with full attribution, what is the line between bringing ideas to a new audience versus appropriation/stealing?).
This is an unease that I cannot fully resolve—indeed, I have come to hope that the answer exists in becoming appreciative of this continual cognitive dissonance along with a willingness to listen with humility to those who raise concerns about my work or how I take space in classrooms/discussions. I know I make mistakes as a white woman speaking about equity and social justice.
I’ve also recognized, however, that I cannot continue to allow that concern to be an excuse to be silent or assume these issues must be discussed by “other people” (a heavily coded phrase). Simply put, I know the field of public relations and professional communications needs scholars willing to question how we can do our work “in a way that is responsible, ethical, and conscious of the consequences of our practice” (Motha, 2014, p. xxiii)[5] and not doing so only allows the status quo to continue.
[1] I did not begin reading Language and Power (Fairclough, 1989, 2015) until after I wrote this. Once I did so, it was impossible not to notice the similarities between my statement and the introduction of Fairclough’s book such as his statement, “I have written in the first person, rather than disguise my personal views and interpretations in the ‘impersonal’ style which is more traditional in academic work” (Fairclough, 1989, p. 15).
[2] As Esposito (2023) stated, “A researcher should ask themselves questions about their own social positions, values, assumptions, interests and experiences and how these can shape the research process, as well as putting the research into context” (p. 9).
[3] Throughout this paper, when I use “we”, I am writing of the community of public relations practitioners and professional communicators of which I still consider myself a member.
[4] I strongly agree with Motion and Leitch (2015), “Within these imaginative moments the critical endeavour may transform from criticism into curiosity – curiosity about how public relations practices may enhance the human condition…. In this way our work may prove even more successful at questioning, subverting, transgressing and ultimately transforming the less acceptable, less equitable aspects of public relations ” (Chapter 11).
[5] I read this book in CI 5464: The Politics of Literacy and Race in Schools, one of my courses for my LRS minor at the University of Minnesota. While the book focuses on discussing the teaching of English to multilingual learners, I found its lessons highly relevant to my work in strategic communication and public relations.
Sandra Boone 