Research

Evolution of Interests

I do not tend to focus on having a set career goal that I am working toward when I choose projects to participate in, topics to spend hours digging into, or work I put out for others to consider; however, I do regularly choose to reflect upon the trail of mementos that I have left behind me as I forged ahead¹.

Currently, my areas of interest, as a PhD candidate in Organizational Communication are:

Physical infrastructure and materiality as text through which organizations communicate
Diversity, equity and inclusion
Identification and belonging
Expressed organizational values
Measured and psychological time
and, Empathy

Taking my interests in physical infrastructures and materiality, I can see linkages to this from as far back as early childhood while growing up around plumbing and construction as well as having watched as a parent went to school to become a Certified Occupational Therapy Assistant (COTA) in my early teens. Growing up around floor plans; ventilation, electrical, and plumbing blueprints; and spending days off from school around construction sites, all influenced my early imagination which was expressed through self-made box forts out of water heater boxes, highly imaginative drawings of floor plans for houses with improbable room themes, and small cities made out of locally forged materials. As I got older, my parent returned to school in their 30s and my days off from school were then spent in anatomy & physiology classes, science labs, and being the live model for practicing splint making and studying muscle groups. All this exposed me to how human bodies can function and can adapt with(out) the use of tools. With all of this in my trail of mementos, as I entered college and took classes that taught me about intersectional feminism and communication I got to thinking more about the mementos and how we communicate belonging through relationships, community organizing, policies, and (lack of) accessibility in our building layouts. I was also introduced to how websites are (not) accessible by colleagues and public figures with a variety of (dis)abilities. Notably, the work of Molly Burke has been very educational for me.

As a scholar at the, among many, intersections of being white, cisgendered, bisexual, and disabled I am constantly challenging myself to wrestle with recognizing my privileges, reinterpreting my limits on access to power, and unearthing socialized hegemonic narratives engrained in my vantage point. One example of navigating equity in accessing institutional support that I routinely return to when I think about diversity, equity, and inclusion comes from my first year of community college. As a first generation college student on any college campus, I was very much at a disadvantage when it came to getting information about resources and knowing what to expect of the institution as many of my peers, faculty members, and support staff tended to be used to many of these processes and it might did not occur to them that the explanation they provided began at Step D rather than Step A. This disparity can be exacerbated by a number of intersectional issues (ex. race, (dis)ability, gender presentation, etc.) and it is the effects/outcomes of the interaction of individual identity with agents/processes of institutions that I am deeply concerned with both understanding and amending. Of note, my dissertation work examines the way in which an institution communicates which bodies belong through their bathroom design and layout decisions.

In addition to being interested in how identities are supported/limited by institutions, I am interested in how individuals come to identify with the various institutions they interact with as well as what barriers exist to their being able to identify with a particular organization. Connected with my interests in physical infrastructure and materiality, I am particularly interested in the ways that an organization is built could have an impact on how people either do or do not forge an identity as part of the institution. For example, there has been much discussion about gendered bathrooms being an infrastructural barrier to identifying with an organization for folks who identify as non-binary or are/have transitioned. The process of negotiating how to exist comfortably in the space is impacted by the physical infrastructural limit that cis-normative & bi-gendered bathrooms communicate. Even beyond gender, navigating physical space and belonging presnets many challenges for folks of other marginalized identities. And for those at the intersections of multiple marginalized identities, some organizations may not be worth setting foot within.

As something that will come to no surprise to folks who work for large organizations, there is commonly a disconnect between the expressed values of the organization and the lived reality of those working for the organization. It is not uncommon for organizations to claim that values like diversity, equity and inclusion are of critical importance to them, but, just below the surface, one can see that there is a lack of supporting action for this claim. This disconnect is often thought of as an act of intentional malice–and I do not doubt this as a possible factor–but I think that there’s more to it than that. Borrowing from a childhood trauma perspective, I think that when those in a position of power and authority make a promise it is not uncommon for it to be a messy way for someone to miscommunicate their hopes. They may want to do what they promise, but they announce that promise before they have the plans for how to make it happen and that haste is often driven by popular discourse. This is not an effort to downplay the pain these actions have caused nor alleviate responsibility for these actions from the powerful decision makers of these organizations, but I believe that in approaching understanding the motivations that can drive this kind of harmful miscommunication I am better able to make suggestions for change that do not put these organizations on the offensive.

So as to not duplicate my full webpage on empathy and the modeling of it, I will briefly share that, in the work I’ve done, empathy is about approaching knowing what another is feeling, simulating feeling what another is feeling, and communicating compassionately. I treat empathy as a metatheoretical approach in my work which means that it shapes the ways that I plan, conduct, and disseminate my work with, by, and for communities.

¹ It is critical that we begin to recognize how both the trail of mementos as well as the act of forging ahead are not fully autonomous decisions. Often, our choices are dictated by, as Maslow would convieve of them, base needs like the ability to eat, sleep, and live in a secure shelter. These needs continue to come at a cost under the contemporary socio-political conceptualization of what life looks like. While I value the work that I’ve done, I do think that it is critical to recognize this major influence on my decision making publically and call on others to do the same.

Select Published Work

Academic For a complete list of my published work look me up using my ORCiD# 0000-0002-9925-6676

Irby A, Macey E, Levine N, Durham JR, Turman JE. Grounding the Work of Grassroots MCH Leaders in Storytelling. Health Promotion Practice. 2023;0(0). doi:10.1177/15248399221151175

Other Professional Writing LASER PULSE, “Secondary Data Management & Organization”

Spring 2023 Work

Research & Consulting

LASER PULSE: Research and Publication Work Group (RPWG) & Capturing the Institutional Memory of the Consortium with Dr. Yuehwern Yih & Pallavi Gupta

Dissertation

Working title:If These Stalls Could Talk (details forthcoming)

Additional Projects

LASER PULSE: Asia Disaster Preparedness Center at Purdue University with Dr. Stacey Connaughton
LASER PULSE: Ethiopia Resilience at Purdue University with Dr. Stacey Connaughton

Highlights in Previous Work

Feminist consultant and Co-author with “Nice” to “ewww”: An inductive thematic analysis of responses to initiation messages containing sexual content on online dating tools at Purdue University with Amanda Lilly in West Lafayette, IN; October 2020- March 2021

I provided an intersectional feminist perspective and language during the interpretation and write-up of research.
Performed edits and revisions to the paper which has been submitted for NCA 2022.

OCMC, University of Kentucky, Virtual, Presented “A Community Based Empathetic Scholarship Model” for a Lightning Talk (October 23-24, 2021)

Second Coder and Co-author with ‘who wants a dick pic? 👉🏽👈🏽’ at Purdue University with Amanda Lilly in West Lafayette, IN; October 2020- March 2021

I assisted in gathering and coding Tweets for inductive thematic analysis.
I provided an intersectional feminist perspective and language during the interpretation and write-up of research.
Performed edits and revisions to the paper which has been submitted for NCA 2021.

Oral Historian and Researcher with Central State Hospital Oral History Project at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis under Dr. Emily Beckman in Indianapolis, IN; September 2018- August 2019

I conducted oral history interviews which contributed to a growing archive of documents related to the late 1980s up through, the closing of Central State Hospital in, 1994 and the effects the closing of the hospital had on staff and patients.
I created two major files for digitally organizing and breaking own a large archive of patient newsletters between 1988 and 1993.

Storytelling Educator and Researcher with Grassroots Maternal and Child Health Leadership Project at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis under Dr. Jack Turman in Indianapolis, IN; September 2018-May 2019

I taught women leaders in communities of high infant mortality how to write personal narratives about leadership. This project was part of my M.A. internship.
Created lesson plans for the storytelling section of the leadership training program our community leaders went through, wrote the manual for how to facilitate the storytelling lessons, created a box for all of the materials of the job to be organized in, and created instructions for digital and physical data management for this job.

Graduate Researcher with Division of Mental Health and Addiction Alcohol and Other Drug Prevention Grant at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis under Eric Teske in Indianapolis, IN; October 2017-December 2018

Background research on prevention efforts, regional use and prevention data, methods, and intervention strategies.
Attended regional and state meetings to collaborate with the other schools currently on this grant.
Conducted faculty symposium, student survey, and student focus groups.
Professional development trainings: SAPST (strategic prevention framework), Social Norming Campaign, SBIRT, Needs Assessment, and Focus Group
Other professional conferences: ICAN, and Marion County Campus Collaboration

Project Assistant with Making Mathematical Reasoning Explicit (a grant funded by NSF) at Washington State University under Libby Knott and Anne Adams in Pullman, WA; June 2015-July 2016

Started out preparing and filing travel expense vouchers (TEV)s for grant participant travel to grant organized meetings and planning travel/lodging for a conference.
Coordinate observations for the research team amongst 65 grade school math teacher leaders across 29 school districts in eastern Washington and northern Idaho; scan and file student reasoning tasks from teacher leaders and other participating teacher’s classes; contact building secretaries and school administrators to alert them of the upcoming observations.
Completed research ethics training.

Peer Advocate with Green River Peer Mentoring and Service Learning Program (formerly Connect 2 complete C2C) under Dyane Haynes in Auburn, WA; April 2013- June 2014

Class based & E-mentoring: I mentored in three developmental education mathematics classes and lead all three through service learning projects. E-mentoring was a component of this where I would post helpful tips and resources on their class discussion board in hopes that this would make the college process smoother.
Peer to Peer mentoring: I would work one on one with “at risk” students who wanted help navigating resources, to have somebody to act as a sounding board, and some informal tutoring
Group mentoring: these are once a week session that are open to the main student body and each week focuses on a different topic that most students struggle with. The goal behind this project was that students would be able to connect with other students so that they could realize that this problem is not unique to them and work collaboratively with Peer Advocates and peers to find solutions to these issues (time management, testing stress, managing group work, etc.)
Planned and maintained two food collection drives for the Auburn Food Bank, one “Helping the Homeless” Drive, and one “OSO Strong” Drive (service-learning projects)
Planned and maintained “Pay-It-Forward tutoring” (service-learning)
Planned and spoke at Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) Education Session (partnered with Counseling Center with Devon Klein); covered topics like the symptoms and treatments of SAD and how to plan a student-centered schedule.
Spoke at: grant program luncheon on behalf of my office as a student doing the work of a peer advocate; spoke on the positives of the program and how the program could be improved.