Grounded in African feminist theory, this study explores how young Nigerian women navigate and negotiate feminist identity within a cultural context where feminism is often misrepresented or misunderstood. Using a qualitative design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with nineteen Nigerian women aged 19 to 35 across diverse social, educational, and religious backgrounds to investigate how feminism is negotiated and redefined. Thematic analysis of their narratives reveals that feminism, for these women, is not a fixed identity but a fluid, strategic, and context-specific practice deeply informed by cultural and societal expectations. By centering African women’s voices and realities, the findings highlight the need for a culturally grounded feminist framework that acknowledges the lived realities and resilience of African women.

Jury service has a complicated reputation in U.S. society because while considered an important democratic tool, it is often thought of as an undesirable chore. To better understand this phenomenon, this study investigated how sociomateriality shaped the constitutional identity of jurors. Through semi-structured interviews with 30 potential jurors from the state of Missouri, we foregrounded sociomaterial struggles that evidence serious incompatibilities between the discursive and material realms of jury service. Participants discussed jury service using aspirational discourses that frame this civic duty as a responsibility, an honor, and a democratic cornerstone. They also surfaced temporal, economic, and tedious difficulties associated with serving. These sociomaterial struggles revealed how jury service is a short-term experience imbued with power asymmetries that must be addressed in efforts to restore its centrality to a constitutional identity relevant in democratic societies. We offer theoretical and practical implications for legal communication scholars and practitioners in the United States.

The present report shares insights and strategies developed over the course of a Community-Based Research project that sought to map and enhance communication about breastfeeding/lactation support in Forsyth County, NC. By engaging with local experts and advocates using a co-creational strategic communications approach, this study revealed that existing community resources are available but woefully under-messaged. The determination to focus on coalition-building and to create a new community-wide website and messaging materials was made in response to the need for greater visibility while not burdening advocates with additional work.

This study examines the use of intentional silence in argumentation, focusing on how it contributes to the prior talk and subsequent course of action. Using an integrated framework that combines communication science and language typology, this research establishes a set of parameters encompassing structural, engagement, and communicative dimensions of silence as a meaningful linguistic resource. The framework is applied to an analysis of a face-to-face argumentation between two Thai state authorities—a policeman and a member of parliament—highlighting a culturally sensitive exchange in a high-context society of Thailand. The findings reveal that silence functions as a meaningful absence of speech for managing epistemic authority, negotiating knowledge asymmetries, and enacting speech acts associated with face management. Intentional silence can shift the epistemic (a)symmetry between communicators by either abdicating or asserting authority, depending on the interactional context and speaker intention. The study further demonstrates that silence does not inherently signal negativity or disengagement; rather, it is a strategic, context-dependent act that supports politeness and conflict mitigation in socially complex and hierarchical discourse. By triangulating the structural, engagement, and communicative aspects of interaction, this study proposes a refined typology of intentional silence, thereby advancing methodological tools for the analysis of its pragmatic functions.

Approximately 1 million women in the United States become a widow each year, and receiving support from others is an expectation during this transition. Although receiving supportive messages from loved ones can be beneficial, not all support is helpful. Moreover, given the emotional intensity of losing one’s spouse, supporters’ attempts at communicating support may have a lasting impact on the grieving process as a memorable message. Given the stakes of communicating support effectively to those who are grieving, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 widowed women to explore how supportive communication between supporters and widows can be improved. Results of a thematic analysis showed that good supporters allow widows to grieve in their own way and on their own timeline, are consistent in their provision of support, find a balance between being present but not overbearing, and often engage in conversations about the deceased as a way of honoring the memory of the late husband. From a practical standpoint, these findings provide guidance on how supporters can provide support competently. Moreover, these findings bolster results from prior studies that have investigated how to best communicate support to those who are grieving.

Work arrangements serve the communicative purpose of indicating when and where workers work. Researchers have reported that the employment of temporary workers (colloquially known as temps) can affect the morale and communication patterns of permanent workers (also known as perms). As they observe changes around them, it is understandable that perms will seek to make sense of those developments in relation to the presumed stability and permanence of their work arrangement. Given the proliferation of temporary positions in the health care sector, this study focuses on how permanent nurses describe the temporary nurses with whom they had worked. This study’s thematic analysis of 35 one-on-one semi-structured interviews resulted in one central theme (competence) and two subthemes (reliability and flexibility). Reliability means that perms can trust the temps to complete tasks; flexibility refers to temps’ ability to quickly learn local practices and to assimilate. Perms consistently describe that good temps demonstrate both traits. It is the combination of these two core traits that establishes their competence. Organizational incumbents are more likely to welcome temporary newcomers when perms recognize that they need help (i.e., there is more work than perms can handle) and that the incoming nonpermanent coworkers can do high-quality work.

This study investigates how political legitimacy is discursively constructed during moments of internal disruption, focusing on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2016 demonetization speech. Drawing on Van Leeuwen’s legitimation framework and sentence-level coding using NVivo, the analysis identifies rationalization (36.79%) and moral evaluation (35.85%) as dominant strategies, frequently co-occurring to frame economic hardship as both necessary and virtuous. Authorization (19.81%) and mythopoesis (7.55%) complement these by reinforcing institutional credibility and cultural symbolism. The study introduces the concept of discursive sovereignty—a rhetorical mode that blends authority, affect, and identity—to explain how populist leaders maintain legitimacy during crises. These findings contribute to the literature on non-Western political communication by illustrating how populist legitimation functions through layered, performative discourse.

Lacrosse is a spiritual game for many Native Americans and other indigenous people. However, scholars have yet to explore the nature of communication related to this game, despite the growing field of sport communication. Thus, as a first step to understanding communication among native people regarding lacrosse we used thematic analysis to examine memorable messages and their impacts from 56 Native Americans. Our results indicate that Native Americans report six distinct types of memorable messages: spirituality, culture, gender, sport, and conflict. These messages come from a variety of sources. These memorable messages in turn have wide ranging impacts including shaping approaches to the game and other individuals.

Deepfakes are hyper-realistic digital manipulations that can distort reality, spreading misinformation rapidly through social media. Their ease of creation due to AI advancement is blurring the line between truth and falsehood, threatening trust, societal stability, and democratic processes. This study focuses on the impact of deepfakes in a country like Pakistan, which has an interesting combination of low media literacy and high social media consumption amongst its large youth population. The research explores whether higher education enhances NML skills, whether gender differences exist in identifying deepfakes, and whether exposure to deepfakes affects trust in online content differently among the participants. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study combines a quasi-experiment with semi-structured interviews, involving participants aged 15–29 from Punjab, Pakistan. The study aims to provide valuable insights into Pakistan’s vulnerabilities to deepfake technology as it is an emerging topic of discussion, especially since AI has exacerbated the situation, and suggests directions for future studies and policy development. The study underscores the importance of integrating NML into educational curricula to combat misinformation.

Online illness communities topically encourage the disclosure of personal health information quickly. Guided by communicated narrative sensemaking theory, this brief study investigates how people living with eating disorders (EDs) construct meaning around co-occurring autoimmune diseases (ADs) through Reddit-based storytelling. Drawing on theories of storytelling and illness narratives, this reflexive thematic analysis illustrates how people enmeshed in ED illness communities on Reddit create meaning and make sense of ADs. Mediated illness narratives regarding these comorbid but separate health conditions underscore implications for narrative sensemaking theorizing and practice.