Annette M. Holba

Communication Ethics in the Communication Curriculum: United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico

This study investigated the status of communication ethics pedagogy at colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. Data were collected from 193 institutions that responded to an online survey. Results showed an increase in communication ethics courses compared with 19 years ago, with 51% now offering a required or optional course in communication ethics. The most common reason for not offering a stand-alone course was that ethical concerns were included in other classes. Respondents noted a decrease in focus on classical ethical theory and an increase in attention to applied ethics and moral reasoning skills. These findings merit a disciplinary discussion of the perceived tension between the classical philosophical foundations of communication ethics and ethics in practice.

In Defense of Leisure

This article discusses the relationship between leisure and human communication and suggests that more attention is needed to study how leisure shapes human communication. After making a distinction between leisure and recreation, this article identifies the implications of leisure to the human condition through rejuvenating our attention to wonder, developing our sense of a-whereness, and advocating the experience of phenomenological listening. The call of leisure offers an alternative to the non-stop, fast-paced communicative environment that affects our ability to communicate with others. This article is offered in defense of leisure and calls for more transdisciplinary attention to leisure and the human condition.

Leisure as Catalyst for Social Justice: Transforming the Political

ABSTRACT This essay pursues the central question, “How should human beings engage decision-making that serves social justice in the public domain?” The short answer involves engaging intentional decision making where we take the other into consideration; setting aside or suspending our own needs, desires, and judgments until we are able to understand and comprehend the matter that has come before us; and being open to learning something new. This kind of intentionality requires wonder and communicative humility. Both wonder and communicative humility are communicative coordinates of an intentionality that is necessary in the development of social justice in social and political contexts. Action engaged through these coordinates of intentionality begins from a contemplative spirit. To develop an understanding of these coordinates more thoroughly, I offer my perspective of leisure as a philosophy of communication that is ethically tied to the other and social justice in the public domain.

A Centennial Celebration: Benchmarks for Philosophy of Communication

In 2013, leadership in the National Communication Association (NCA) released a call for Centennial Panel submissions designed to explore specific aspects of the communication discipline in depth cover the last 100 years. The intention of this call was to focus on various pasts within the discipline in order to demonstrate how these pasts continue to shape, guide, and impact our present scholarship, teaching, and various other engagements. The call explicitly stated that the Centennial Series would provide a textured landscape responsive to the varying ways that its historical terrain could be divided up instead of trying to fit everything into one common theme. In this way, the centennial celebration would be representative of the diverse and complex voices that have come to shape the communication discipline over the last 100 years. The NCA membership was called to take a look at itself from a divisional, interest group, caucus lens and reflect upon its own growth, contribution, and impact that it has had on the larger discipline of communication. The task of this essay is to document the Philosophy of Communication Division’s centennial panel that gathered to reflect upon the evolution of philosophy of communication as a field of study within the communication discipline. The Philosophy of Communication Division (hereafter referred to as “the Division”) of the NCA recently evolved from the Semiotic Division. The Division was formed in 1992, which, at that time in the history of the NCA (then named the Speech Communication Association, SCA), was referred to as commission. The initial name was the Semiotics and Communication Commission until the NCA later changed commission to division. Many communication scholars recognize and understand the conception of semiotics and its value to studying communication in a broader sense, though the Semiotics and Communication Division was not fully

Political Communication and Leisure

Leisure offers a dynamic contribution to the field of communication studies especially since it provides an ongoing contribution to the public domain (Goodale and Godbey, 1988). Leisure helps to cultivate communication competence for ones participation in any form of political engagement. Therefore, leisure philosophically enriches ones understanding and practice of political communication by transforming ones participation in the public domain. Many classical and contemporary texts from the Western tradition, including Aristotles Politics, Ciceros Republic, and John of Salisburys Policraticus suggest that leisure is fundamentally political and central to the public sphere. Both Western and Eastern political traditions also understand an interconnectedness between public political communicative engagement and philosophical leisure (Liu, 1955; Mills and Murphy, 1973; Lu, 1998; Dawson, 2002). This essay focuses on political communication and leisure specifically within a Western philosophical framework, asserting that political communication and leisure are inescapably linked.

Bridges Not Walls: The Communicative Enactment of Dialogic Storytelling

This essay examines Stewarts Bridges Not Walls: A Book about Interpersonal Communication as a textual artifact in discussing dialogic storytelling. Using interpretive qualitative research, we detail the philosophy of dialogic storytelling and then engage in an interpretation of Bridges Not Walls. This essay first situates our interpretive path through the metaphors of historicity, temporal common center of responsiveness, and horizon of historical consciousness, which manifest dialogic storytelling. The interpretive method used in this essay is a philosophically constructive approach grounded in the work of Gadamer and Ricoeur, which renders the meaning of a text through the “fusion of horizons” of the text and the historical moment while offering a public accounting of that meeting. We next provide a public accounting of the evolution of the study of a relational view of interpersonal communication. We explore Stewarts time-tested interpersonal reader Bridges Not Walls as an artifact of dialogic storytelling; the editions of his work both shape and exhibit a shift in emphasis from transactional, to humanistic, to dialogic interpersonal communication. We address the dialogue of horizons, the “between” of our interpretive metaphors and Bridges Not Walls as a text, suggesting that dialogic storytelling offers a heuristic invitation to understand the varying traditions of human communication.

Philosophical leisure as recuperative praxis: texturing human communication.

Abstract This essay advances the argument that everyday human communication has become overly phatic in nature due to a general eclipse of leisure in ones life. The eclipse of leisure is rhetorical and lived because the understanding of leisure has been distorted by rapid technological advancement and its permeation into everyday life. This essay uses the couplet philosophical leisure to remind the reader of the classical sense of leisure, which shifts our understanding of leisure back to its etymological and philosophical origin. Additionally, this essay demonstrates that while the state of human communication is currently flat and void of otherness, the recuperative power of philosophical leisure can shift communicative attributes into a deep and textured way of communicating with others.