I approach communication as an ecological process operating among organizations, publics, technologies, environments, and cultural systems. This perspective connects strategic communication with environmental communication, visual communication, risk communication, community resilience, and intercultural competence. My work focuses particularly on the ethical consequences of these relationships: what publics notice, whom they trust, which actions appear possible, and where responsibility is distributed when complex systems succeed or fail.
My research examines applied and theoretical questions about the ethical management of strategic communication among organizations, institutions, and their publics. I am particularly interested in situations in which messages alone cannot explain outcomes because information interacts with technologies, designed environments, cultural narratives, institutional practices, and material circumstances. Drawing on design ecology, environmental symbology, human-computer interaction, and critical inquiry, I use qualitative and mixed methods to investigate communication across these interconnected systems.
My research program comprises two complementary lines of inquiry. The first examines visual-spatial and institutional communication: how visual, symbolic, material, and organizational systems interact to shape public meaning. Organizations communicate not only through speeches, campaigns, websites, media relations, and social platforms but also through the spaces, technologies, interfaces, products, policies, and procedures through which publics encounter them. My expertise in environmental symbology allows me to examine material and visual systems as components of organizational identity, reputation, legitimacy, and relationship management. It also creates opportunities to study communication via the spatial organization of an institution, the design of an interface, the representation of a community, the accessibility of information, or the procedures through which publics encounter organizational authority. This line of inquiry also addresses community resilience, which depends partly on institutions and communities developing shared understanding, trust, and capacity for coordinated action. I examine how organizations can better align what they say, what publics experience, and what institutions enable people to do.
The second line of my research examines ethical health and risk communication at the human–animal–environment interface, with particular attention to environmental health, food systems, and community resilience. My doctoral research on backyard poultry biosecurity demonstrated the importance of examining risk communication beyond knowledge and attitudes alone, leading me to develop behavioral feasibility as an important consideration in strategic risk communication. Responsible behavior may depend on equipment, product design, physical space, task sequencing, habitual practice, access to resources, and the practical feasibility of recommended actions. Health, safety, and environmental recommendations may therefore be factually correct yet remain ineffective or inequitable when they assume that all publics possess comparable time, money, space, equipment, literacy, institutional access, or authority to act. Communication cannot be evaluated ethically only by asking whether information was scientifically accurate or successfully transmitted; strategic communication ethics must also consider what publics can realistically understand and accomplish within the systems in which they live. My prior work involving intercultural competence informs my approach to strategic communication across diverse publics and reinforces the need to understand how histories, identities, values, institutional relationships, and norms influence interpretation and action.
Methodologically, I use qualitative and mixed-method approaches to study communication at multiple scales, from individual encounters with messages, objects, interfaces, and environments to the institutional systems through which information, authority, and responsibility are organized. I have extended this work through collaborations with organizations and public audiences to develop and assess communication strategies, digital resources, training systems, organizational processes, and public-facing materials intended to help people interpret evidence, navigate uncertainty, and coordinate action. This applied-theoretical relationship is central to my scholarly identity: practical communication problems generate questions that can advance theory, while theory provides frameworks for designing and evaluating more ethical and effective practice.