Kurt Lindemann

The military represents one of the most pervasive and influential social institutions in contemporary societies (Giddens, 1987). In the United States, the Marine Corps is one of the major branches ...

In this chapter, the author uses autoethnography to explore issues of work-life balance and family communication, tracing his narrative inheritance of conventional understandings about work, family, and identity. The author's own experiences provide room for interrogations of the ways scholarship often juxtaposes the concepts of family and work, and how these concepts are further problematized when examining communication in a family business. Such an examination also provides significant implications for the ways communication scholars might investigate these concepts in the future, and the ways they might think about their own approach to work. Once a concept new to organizational studies, work-life balance continues to be re-thought in the wake of evolving business practices and technological advances. Attitudes toward work-life balance are gendered and fraught with power relations. Because organizations, family-owned or not, continue to blur the boundaries of home and work, almost any such activity today can qualify as self-enhancement: physical exercise and reading among them.

Scholarship on disability and communication in organizations is still a nascent area of research and often ignores an understanding of the various modes of disability and the history of disability rights organizing. This entry offers an explanation of five approaches to conceptualizing disability. It then summarizes the ways understandings of disability have been organized in the disability rights movement and provides a discussion of how disability is communicated in organizations through policy and interactions, as well as the ways disability centered organizing has been studied, placing emphasis on the “activist‐scholar” model of research.

I stand in front of my class, struggling to explain the concepts of voice and audience. The words don’t come to me, but a feeling does. It’s a feeling I first encountered reading H. L. “Bud” Goodall, Jr. Bud approached the reader as if talking to a sympathetic but skeptical stranger at a party, leaning in close and sharing a revelatory story that he hoped would convince the other person to live his or her life a bit more fully. That’s what I want to tell the students today. But how do you put that into words? Bud knew.

Explorations of the intersections of disability and sport have painted a multilayered picture of crucial aspects of communication including issues of gender, health, politics, and organizational tensions. Media-focused scholarship has identified different ways that sport articulates, perpetuates, and can challenge ableist views of disabled bodies. This article explores sites for additional communication research building on work on disability and sport from outside the communication and media studies field. The scholarship on disability and sport is explored around three themes: disability sport and rehabilitation discourse; disability metaphors and stereotypes; and sport, public controversy, and disability law. Possibilities for communication-focused work around each of these themes are also explored, and a case is made for the continued emphasis on integration of feminist, queer, and critical race theory into the study of discourse around disability and sport.

Gender and ability are integral to the cultural significance of sport, but contemporary media depictions of high school athletes rarely direct attention to the interaction of these issues. In contrast, the critically acclaimed television series Friday Night Lights (FNL) presents a complex and problematic portrayal of masculinity, disability, and sport. Our analysis explores how its disability imagery and themes obscure displays that inform a subtext of homoerotics. Bringing queer and disability theory together, we craft a lens for reading the show's coordination of compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality. Using Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's analysis of homosociality to discuss specific erotic triangles in FNL's first season, we examine how its displays of homosocial desire and disability interact. Erotic triangles appear throughout the series and generate much of the show's dramatic appeal. A central plotline of the first season revolves around high school quarterback Jason Street, who becomes quadriplegic after a football injury in the pilot episode. Street's disability changes his relationships with the other main characters and dramatically transforms his place in the show's erotic triangles. Reading Street's disability story as a queer narrative, we emphasize the series’ display of contests between homosociality and homoerotics, emasculation and rehabilitation, and athletics and disability.

Disability has become a pervasive and contested issue on college campuses, and instructors and students find themselves occupying physical and discursive spaces that hold great pedagogical potential. This essay pursues such a consideration. It examines one physically disabled student's staged performances of a personal narrative, her ethnography of a university's disabled student services office, an in-depth interview with the student, and the author's family experiences with disability to illustrate the ways a performative pedagogy offers insight into (dis)ability in the classroom. The analysis illuminates the classroom as a site for identity negotiation, performance as a tool to deconstruct and reconstruct notions of ability, and family relationships as an integral part of a critical communication pedagogy.