My research examines the ethics of public relations and strategic communication in systems where information, material environments, institutional authority, and audience context jointly shape what people understand and are realistically able to do. I pursue this agenda through two connected lines of inquiry.
The first provides the broad theoretical foundation for my work by examining spatial, symbolic, visual, and institutional communication. This research considers how organizations and institutions communicate identity, belonging, authority, memory, responsibility, and public values through physical environments, visual media, digital interfaces, and other designed communication systems. It asks how these systems shape relationships with publics, make organizational values visible, and reinforce or challenge existing structures of power and inclusion.
The second narrows this framework to health communication and some of the most pressing global health challenges intensified by accelerating urbanization, including zoonotic disease, food-system vulnerability, and community resilience. Focusing on the human–animal–environment interface, this work investigates ethical risk communication and behavioral feasibility: how public agencies, extension organizations, health professionals, businesses, and other institutions communicate health risks and responsibilities to diverse publics, and whether the actions they recommend are understandable, credible, culturally responsive, and materially feasible. Together, these lines examine not only what institutions communicate, but how communication systems shape trust, responsibility, and the capacity of publics to act.
Together, these lines position public relations as an ecological process in which organizations, publics, technologies, environments, cultural narratives, and institutional practices jointly produce meaning and shape relationships.
This ecological perspective is particularly useful for examining complex public problems. Environmental and health risks are rarely communicated through a single message, campaign, or spokesperson. Publics encounter information through government guidance, news and social media, organizational websites, professional advice, product marketing, community practices, digital interfaces, physical environments, and interpersonal networks. These sources may reinforce one another, but they may also conflict, conceal uncertainty, weaken trust, or assign responsibility to individuals who lack the knowledge, resources, authority, or practical means to act.
My work examines these interconnected communication systems and asks how they can be made more ethical, credible, actionable, and responsive to public needs. Rather than evaluating public relations only through message exposure or stated intentions, I am interested in whether communication supports informed decision-making, equitable participation, organization–public relationships, and the capacity of communities to respond under conditions of risk and uncertainty.
My master’s thesis and foundational article on environmental symbology established a framework for understanding how designed environments communicate personal, sociocultural, and mythic meanings and regulate social behavior. This work demonstrated that environments are not passive settings. They function as systems of visual-spatial communication through which identities, relationships, permissions, boundaries, and institutional values become legible. Subsequent scholarship expanded this inquiry across physical, cultural, technological, and educational settings and examined how designed communication systems shape interpretation, adaptation, identity, belonging, and outcomes.
This foundation now supports a distinctive contribution to public relations and strategic communication. Organizations communicate not only through news releases, campaigns, speeches, social media, and websites, but also through the spaces, technologies, interfaces, products, and procedures through which publics encounter them. These systems can strengthen an organization’s stated commitments, or they can contradict messages about inclusion, transparency, accessibility, care, and public responsibility. My research therefore treats visual communication and material environments as consequential elements of organizational identity, reputation, legitimacy, and relationship management.
My doctoral research applied this perspective to a specific problem at the intersection of food systems, animal welfare, household resilience, and zoonotic disease. Using a simulated agent, body and object mapping, and processual analysis, I documented potential fomite-transfer pathways during routine backyard-poultry care. Findings showed that transfer possibilities were shaped not only by an individual’s knowledge but also by equipment, product design, physical access, task sequencing, and unconscious routine behaviors.
The public relations implication is significant. Biosecurity communication often emphasizes individual compliance: audiences are told what they should do, while comparatively little attention is paid to whether recommended actions are feasible within their material and social conditions. My developing scholarship therefore asks how organizations define risk, responsibility, and appropriate action in public-facing guidance. This work moves beyond framing unsuccessful biosecurity as an individual failure to follow instructions and instead examines how public relations materials, visual communication, products, environments, and institutional practices can support or obstruct responsible action.
This research contributes to the study of strategic risk communication by introducing behavioral feasibility as an ethical consideration.
Communication may be factually accurate yet remain ineffective or inequitable if it assumes that all publics possess the same time, money, space, equipment, literacy, institutional access, or ability to implement recommendations. Ethical research translation and public relations practice must therefore account for audience context, cultural meaning, uncertainty, perceived efficacy, trust, access, and the possibility that communication may stigmatize communities or transfer organizational responsibility onto individuals.
Following my dissertation, I tested the broader applicability of this research program through embedded, community-engaged work conducted with organizations, public audiences, and collaborators through the Design Ecology Lab. This work allowed me to develop and assess communication strategies, digital resources, training systems, organizational processes, and public-facing materials intended to help audiences interpret complex evidence, navigate uncertainty, and coordinate action.
My professional leadership has also provided an applied setting for public relations research and practice. I have developed internal communication systems, leadership messaging, role-based training materials, public relations and marketing campaigns, web-based materials, landing pages, lead magnets, sales scripts, and stakeholder communications. I have directed external communication implemented by other employees and worked with higher education, local government, workforce organizations, nonprofits, schools, faith communities, businesses, and community stakeholders. These experiences have reinforced the importance of alignment among organizational identity, public messaging, operational reality, and stakeholder expectations.
This work has also highlighted gaps in our understanding of how symbolic and visual communication influence institutional trust, shared identity, adaptive capacity, and the coordination on which community resilience depends. Public relations can contribute to resilience when it strengthens relationships before a crisis, communicates uncertainty transparently, makes actionable information accessible, and provides publics with meaningful opportunities to participate. It can undermine resilience when communication becomes primarily reputational, ignores unequal capacities, or treats communities as message recipients rather than partners.