(In)civilities
Survival for marginalized folks requires communication skills and understanding power dynamics in ways that often result in polite and/or civil discourse. This final session in the Civil Discourse: Becoming a Better Conversation Partner series examines how we survive through politeness, the consequences of such politeness, and how politeness is policed through power structures that relate to privilege, merit, tokenism, whiteness, maleness, straightness, and other forms of power.
Meet the Guest: Stacey K. Sowards
Dr. Stacey Sowards teaches courses in communication theory, rhetorical theory, environmental communication, gender and communication, and intercultural communication. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 2001.
Her research focuses on environmental, intercultural, and gender and communication in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the United States. Her dissertation was a study of environmental organizations in Kalimantan, Indonesia, and was funded by a J. William Fulbright grant in 2000-2001. In 2005, she received a Fulbright-Hays grant for further study in Indonesia. She speaks both Spanish and Indonesian.
Her work in communication and rhetoric has been published as book chapters and journal articles. Other research projects focus on cultural and gender representations, and appear in journals such as Argumentation and Advocacy, Communication Studies, Philosophy and Rhetoric, and Communication Theory. Her book, on Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers, was published in 2019 with The University of Texas Press.Dr. Stacey K. Sowards served the department chair and a full professor in the department of communication and research fellow in the Sam Donaldson Center at the University of Texas at El Paso for many years before joining the Department of Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.
Additional Resources
- The Promise and Peril of Interracial Dialogue by Srividya Ramasubramanian, Ph.D., and Anna Wolfe, Ph.D.
- For even more in depth reading Beyond Civility: The Competing Obligations of Citizenship (book) by William Keith and Robert Danisch
View the Live Event
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Featured Speakers:
- Amanda G. McKendree, Associate Teaching Professor of Management and Arthur F. and Mary J. O’Neil Director of The Eugene D. Fanning Center for Business Communication, Department of Management & Organization, University of Notre Dame
- Stacey K. Sowards, Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, University of Texas at Austin