Asynchronous discussions are a useful instructional resource in the online communication course. In discussion groups students have the opportunity to actively participate and interact with students and the instructor. Asynchronous communication allows for flexibility because "participants can interact with significant amounts of time between…

This paper argues that environmental destruction arises from a discourse rooted in Western Economic and Scientific Theory. This discourse artificially separates individuals from our natural world and argues that competition and utilitarian actions are beneficial to society. It is however, a discourse that is taking us to a Shakespearean tragic…

This paper examines language stylization in "Aigia Fuxia" ("The Fuchsia Goat"), a highly popular Greek Cypriot sitcom, where the (imagined) linguistic and socio-cultural "self" of a dialect-speaking community is subjected to extreme and aberrant stylization. The overarching filmic and generic trademark of "Aigia…

Given the diverse array of media sources available to students today, it stands to reason that some media outlets would be of greater quality than others when communicating particular subjects to students. But what constitutes effectiveness among the many choices in information sourcing might not be easily intuited. For example, previous findings…

This essay examines the deliberately humorous approaches undertaken in two recent higher education marketing endeavors: The American Council on Education's "Solutions for Our Future" campaign and Stanford's "Hail, Stanford, Hail" initiative. Three television commercials from each project are described and discussed in light of a view of comedy…

Dominant perspectives of basic writers' self-sponsored literacies tend to overlook the important roles such activities can play in literate development. Drawn from texts, interviews, and participant-observations collected during a five-year study, this article continues the examination of the relationship between one writer's curricular and…

Rather than propose or endorse a single theory of comedy, this essay explores a wide variety of implications in sometimes-conflicting ideas on the subject. It groups questions under such topics as types of comedy, plot, social morality, and identity. These questions are drawn from a wide range of viewpoints both ancient and modern. It concludes…

This article will examine the potential for language change from the bottom-up given the new domains in which minority languages are present as a result of the process of language mobility. Drawing on a theoretical notion of sociolinguistic scales, this article aims to discuss how the position of the Irish language has been reconfigured. From this…

Teachers are at high risk for stress, negative emotion, and job dissatisfaction, which has been linked with health problems and early attrition. Humor has been found to relieve various forms of stress. However, there is a gap in the literature regarding humor effects on teacher stress and its related consequences. The purpose of this quantitative,…

Social studies teachers are tasked with aiding their students' abilities to engage in public debate and make politically sound decisions. One way the authors have found to help facilitate this is to draw connections between content knowledge and current political conversations through the use of clips from "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." While…

This article focuses on approaches to teaching dramatic comedy in an upper-level undergraduate course. In particular, it outlines how the genre of comedy permits a special focus on Austria, where the rich tradition of comedy holds a prominent place in German-speaking Europe. I argue that dramatic comedy grants language learners a unique…

This dissertation takes a discursive approach to Hawai'i stand-up comedy, which is a highly dramaturgical genre, and it examines the cultural specificity of Hawaii comedy in an explicitly interactional context. This culturally-specific performative genre is a discursive site where comedians and their audiences jointly construct multivocal humor…

The aim of this paper is to examine the increased potential for language change from the micro-level, given the new domains in which minority languages are present in the global era. Drawing on the theoretical notion of sociolinguistic scales this paper presents a comparative account of the changing positions of the Irish and Inari Sami languages.…

My dissertation, "Erotic Love and the Development of Proto-Capitalist Ideology in Early Modern Comedy" demonstrates how increased crown authority, and an expanded market combine with the mixed agency of the romantic comedy daughter to further encourage early modern economic growth. The triumph of rebelling daughter over blocking father has…

The reported study follows the footsteps of Heider, and Simmel (1944) [Heider, F., & Simmel, M. (1944). An experimental study of apparent behavior. "American Journal of Psychology," 57, 243-249] and Michotte (1946/1963) [Michotte, A. (1963). "The perception of causality" (T.R. Miles & E. Miles, Trans.). London: Methuen (Original work published…