How communication shapes research practice and outcomes

Congratulations to graduate student Jen Smith-Mayo!

Jen just published an article in Communication Design Quarterly – “Embodied Participation: (re)Situating Bodies in Collaborative Research” – highlighting how the many ways in which people interact while collaborating, from listening, sharing and organizing ideas to fostering empathy, deciding what questions to ask, working through tensions and laughing together, shape research and its outcomes.

“Our work pays attention to the many ways in which bodies are a foundational part of research, from the ways bodies participate, collaborate within, are studied, conduct studies, write together and are written (or not written) about,” says Jennifer Smith-Mayo, Ph.D. student  in communication at the University of Maine and co-author of the study. “This focus on embodiment draws attention to research practices that, in the process of striving for objectivity in data, may make bodies involved in that research invisible or detach them from the research context.”

Learn more about the communication research that Jen and colleagues are conducting as part of the Maine-eDNA project…