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Department of Communication Studies News

The Department of Communication Studies offers programs focused on relational and public communication. We teach and deploy communication skills in interpersonal, small group, organizational, and political settings, which in turn helps others to develop critical thinking, writing, and speaking skills. Our goal is to best serve communication needs by training citizens to engage, motivate, and impact communities.

Current Communication Studies News

Bird
Campus News |

A selection of top headlines featuring UNLV experts from the front half of the fall semester.

Headshot photo of a Native American woman with dark hair wearing a dark top with red lipstick and long dark green tassel-like earrings smiles in an image inset within a stock photo depicting desert brush in the foreground and a blue sky and mountain range in the background
People |

For the Patrick T. Smith Achievement in Service honoree, offering a helping hand to those in need isn’t an obligation — it’s a way of life.

Students in a calssroom.
Campus News |

This class helps students appreciate and understand cultural differences to find common ground.

A professor sits at a desk with two students on their laptops.
Campus News |

Communication studies classes and a new COM Lab feature help students from any major improve public speaking and listening skills.

Two women talk across a desk.
Campus News |

The COM Lab helps students prepare for presentations and develop confidence for in-person interactions.

UNLV letters placed in front of rocky landscape at Red Rock state park
People |

Created in honor of longtime staff member, a new geoscience scholarship celebrates 50 years of change while helping the next generation of scientists.

Communication Studies In The News

ABC News

Fewer than half of Senate races will have candidate debates this year.

Las Vegas Review Journal

As he walked outside the Thomas & Mack Center after Saturday morning’s UNLV spring commencement ceremony, new graduate Miguel Cerda said he felt pride and a sense of relief.

Las Vegas Review Journal

Nevadans are feeling the effects of extreme heat in their lives and on their wallets, a newly published UNLV report reveals.

City Cast Las Vegas

Ahead of World Circus Day this Saturday, we’re taking a look behind the curtain at the physical strain performers endure for their careers. Las Vegas is a major destination for acrobats, but our city lacks the protections and medical care needed to help manage the pain that accompanies their dazzling skills. UNLV professor and aerial performer Laura Martinez studies the culture of the circus industry and how they discuss pain. She joins co-host Dayvid Figler to explain this behind-the-scenes dynamic — and how Las Vegas commodifies performers’ bodies.

Juris Education

What’s the most challenging and the most rewarding aspect of joining a debate union?

Grist

You’re probably familiar with the concept of a carbon footprint: a personal tally of transgressions that contribute to planet-warming emissions. The “carbon footprint” is well established in the climate movement’s lexicon, despite the guilt and shame that it evokes — and despite the fact that many people now know the term was popularized in an ad campaign by the oil company British Petroleum, a shockingly effective gambit to put the onus of addressing the climate crisis on individuals, not the corporations or governments that have contributed the most to the problem.

Communication Studies Experts

A rhetorical studies professor who researches the impact of cultural influences on how we view food and taste.
Dean of the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs and expert in community renewal, risk and crisis communications. 
An expert on science communication, religion and politics.
An expert in competitive debate, policy debate, argumentation and persuasion, and presidential and political debates.
An expert on debate and argument theory.
An expert in privacy and disclosure in online communications.

Recent Communication Studies Accomplishments

Rebecca Rice (Communication Studies) published Managing Corporate Scandal: A Communication Approach (Routledge). The book explores the multiple communication challenges and opportunities companies encounter when faced with a scandal to create a holistic view of why scandals occur and how readers can join organizations as…
Jeffrey T. Child (Communication Studies) recently had an encyclopedia entry accepted for publication in the second edition of the International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy about Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory. The entry describes the propositions, scope, and state of research utilizing CPM as a framework to…
Jihyun Kang (Communication Studies) and co-authors Joris Van Ouytsel and Steve Corman published a paper titled “Communicating Evolving Vision in Early-Stage Startups: From Founder Intent to Employee Engagement” in the Journal of the International Council for Small Business. The article examines how founders of early-stage startups communicate…
Emma Frances Bloomfield (Communication Studies) published an article titled, "Tensions of In/fertility and Identity: A Rhetorical Autoethnography of Environmentalism, Motherhood, and Womanhood" in the Quarterly Journal of Speech. The article examines the author's personal experiences with infertility as a vehicle to reflect on rhetorical…
Donovan Conley (Communication Studies) and Justin Eckstein (PLU; former UNLV MA graduate) published a co-authored paper titled "Phronimos / Taster" in Rhetoric Society Quarterly. The essay theorizes "venatic taste," the hunter-like attentiveness to foraging, as a mode of rhetorical invention rooted in phronesis, or practical wisdom. The authors…
David R. Gruber and Donovan Conley (both Communication Studies) published a co-authored paper titled, "The architecture of anomaly: agential errancy in human-AI relations" in Critical Studies in Communication. The article examines errors arising amid human and AI interaction, theorizing them as “agential errors,” namely, as generative…