Communication Monographs

High reliability organization (HRO) theory, grounded in mindfulness, helps high-risk organizations avoid catastrophic errors. This paper argues HRO principles orient organizational members toward mindfulness to prevent “inertial blind spots” but this can also erode individual and organizational stability when applied post-failure. We argue catastrophic failure is a fundamentally embodied experience shaped by lived experiences, sociocultural constraints, and habituated behavior. Examining mindfulness as a starting point, we show how it facilitates operational awareness but obscures how work, bodies, and relationships are reconstituted after loss. We offer a novel framework, the Trauma-Informed Communication Framework for HROs, promoting more holistic mindfulness – one that recognizes non-linear paths of grief and trauma and better addresses tensions between individual and collective resilience following HRO failure.

This study investigates the reciprocal relationship between ethnicity-based communication and ethnic identity among minority employees over time. A week-long diary study was conducted with 261 full-time ethnic minority employees in the United States. Multilevel model results showed that both intra- and inter-ethnic communications were associated with increased social support, which, in turn, contributed to more positive ethnic regard, a key element of ethnic identity. Furthermore, positive ethnic regard led to more intra-ethnic communication, but not inter-ethnic communication, in subsequent interactions. These findings advance our understanding of the dynamics of communication and social identity in the workplace.

Across the social sciences, researchers increasingly are adopting community-engaged research methods to address social problems. Communication researchers still face disciplinary, bureaucratic, and paradigmatic challenges in developing research programs in community-engaged methods. Concomitantly, the larger body of literature on community-engaged research is poorer because of the lack of communication perspectives informing it. Through this collaborative “forum” essay, a diverse group of community-engaged health communication scholars offer experiential insights to address this double dilemma. We offer a reflexive account of the “risks and rewards” of community-engaged research for communication researchers. We then demonstrate how communication perspectives enliven the process of engaging communities in research. Both facets are discussed at the interpersonal, institutional, community, and policy levels, with the objective of broadening the knowledge on community-engaged research practices.

This paper reports the findings from two randomized controlled experiments and a field study, evaluating the effectiveness of a culture-centered campaign co-designed with foreign domestic workers in Singapore on the public knowledge of, attitude toward, and support for policy protections for their rights. The process of co-creating voice infrastructures in partnership with hyper-precarious workers sought to address the upstream structural determinants of health. Led by a community advisory group of workers involved in the formative research, strategy, implementation, and evaluation, this campaign offers an empirical example of the culture-centered process for organizing justice-based health communication interventions. Moreover, the conceptualization of effectiveness, anchored in the voices of communities at the margins, puts forth nodes for conceptualizing data justice in health communication.

This article recenters physical contexts in mediated communication, drawing on scholarship on communication and space and interviews with gay dating app (GDA) users in Seoul, South Korea. Findings suggested that GDAs virtually expanded the heavily stigmatized population’s everyday capacity to navigate and co-construct (parts of) Seoul as a fluctuating gay place(s) but with ongoing contextualizations through their physical situatedness. Physical gayborhoods’ boundedness shifted as GDAs enabled them to hybridly merge spatial contexts. Rather than simple virtualization, negotiations around societal and in-group stigmas and desires for physically grounded belonging were observed, and the gayborhoods importantly constituted the hybrid space by materially and discursively congregating diverse users. Based on the findings, I propose “layerability,” a topologically specified approach to visibility affordance.

This study extended the Narrative Engagement Theory by testing culturally-grounded, animation narrative videos designed to reduce undocumented students’ perceived barriers to talking to a mental health professional (MHP). Students were randomly assigned to view one of four conditions: a control video, a Confidentiality & Stigma video, a Procedural Knowledge video, or both intervention videos. Undocumented students who strongly identified with the characters in the Confidentiality & Stigma video or both intervention videos reported greater intentions to talk to an MHP at the immediate post-test and one-month later. For highly stressed undocumented students, viewing the Procedural Knowledge video or both intervention videos led to seeing an MHP more since baseline. The findings were mixed for the U.S.-born sample.