The disproportionate number of police-involved shootings reflect the underlying conditions of traditionally conservative, racist policing. Recent updates and communication refinements to police training methodologies could improve training processes, which in turn, may improve societal perceptions of police in the United States. Law enforcement officers in the United States have become the focus of public policy outcry and generalized distrust, further complicating the dangers of contemporary policing. Concealed weapons and the close proximity of civilians policing the police with cellphone cameras complicate issues of officer safety. State and national incidents have resulted in police processes and behaviors being broadcast and violently challenged. In response to these challenges, Texas police academies and law enforcement training agencies are changing the way police learn to police. During the preparation of this study, the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement adopted a legislatively mandated update to the Basic Peace Officer Certification training. After a three-year revision process, in late 2019, the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement replaced the former 643-hour Basic Peace Officer Course with the newest Basic Peace Officer Course #1000696. Through its goals, definitions, and instructional guides, the Course #1000696 could potentially stimulate occupational identity, unify community policing culture, and foster community perception repair.

Using communicated narrative sense-making model and discourse-dependence, the present study examined the retrospective narratives parents told their adult children with visible disabilities in order for them to make sense of their disabilities in their families and to build personal identity. Eleven participants ages 18 to 30 with visible disabilities participated in the study and told retrospective narratives while also relying on internal boundary management strategies to communicate in the family about disability. The results indicated that two narrative content themes emerged: limiting narratives and positive/normalizing narratives. Additionally, a narrative shift was found in narrative structure as some participants got older. Implications for family communication and disabilities, as well as for CNSM and discourse-dependence, are discussed. Finally, future research directions are discussed.

Misinformation remains pervasive in digital platforms, shaping how individuals receive news online. Prior work suggests that credibility perceptions of misinformation can differ based on the modality of the misinformation message. Informed by the MAIN model, this quantitative study conducted two separate 2 (Modality: video or text) x 2 (Social endorsement cues: high vs. low) between-subject experiments to assess the influence of message modality and social endorsement cues on misinformation credibility judgments. The experiments reviewed two different topics of misinformation: artificial intelligence technology malfunction (N = 296) and a cure for cancer (N = 306). Results for Study 1 on artificial intelligent technology malfunction misinformation indicated that participants who viewed the video modality judged a higher perception of source expertise and message credibility. The results of Study 2 suggested that the text presentation of health misinformation prompted higher message elaboration relative to the video conditions. Findings suggest that modality does influence how people judge misinformation messages depending on the subject matter. In addition, source credibility influences how people judge message credibility. The paper concludes with a discussion of theoretical implications and practical applications.

Queer youth enactments of agency, resistance, and worldmaking have been under researched in rhetorical studies. Investigating how queer world making for youth takes place at a space entitled Camp Half-Blood, a live action role playing (LARP) fantasy camp for ages 8-18, this study contends that queer youth at Camp Half-Blood utilize Burke's equipment for living, disidentifications, queer relationality, and queer hope as embodiments that create queer lifeworlds and mobilize queer campers toward queer livable futures. By interviewing campers on their perspectives of being queer at camp and the impact LARPing had on the creation of queer youth identity, as well as the ways LARPing and camp affected queer youth camper envisioning of the future, this research maintains that queer youth have the potential to utilize LARPing in radical ways to revise (cis)heteronormative and hegemonic understandings of their social standings in the world. Camp Half-Blood also offers an opportunity to bring research on queer youth in fandoms from online spaces to offline spaces and extends research on youth agency and youth queer world making.

Answering the call to decenter whiteness and coloniality within communication studies (#RhetoricSoWhite), this project attempts to reclaim space for indigenous knowledge and to serve decolonial struggles. Written as a project of love for my fellow indigenous scholars and peoples, I expand upon Tiara Na'puti's conceptualization of "Indigeneity as Analytic" and chart how indigenous Pacific Island decolonial resistance operates through a paradigm of decolonial futurity. By recognizing Guåhan (Guam), as well as Chamoru, bodies as (de)colonial borderlands, I demonstrate the radical potential of indigeneity through three different case studies. First, I name indigenous feminine style as a strategic mode of public address adopted by Governor Lou Leon Guerero to resist the spread of COVID-19 by US military personnel on the island of Guåhan. Second, I showcase how the process and practice of indigenous Pacific Island tattooing delinks away from coloniality. Finally, I demonstrate how the celebration of a Chamoru saint, Santa Marian Kamalen, provides a spatial-temporal intervention that articulates an indigenous religion and enacts a decolonial futurity.