Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today, our architect is Brenda J. Allen. Brenda received her PhD in Organizational Communication in 1989 from Howard University, and her 30-year career includes long tenure on faculties at the University of Colorado, 12 years in Boulder and another 18 in Denver, including rising up the ranks, from Professor to Chair to Associate Dean to Vice Chancellor of D&I. She has over 60 articles and chapters, an influential multi-edition book, and several co-edited volumes and issues. She has received a bevy of awards and high honors, including the 2004 Francine Merritt Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Lives of Women in Communication, the 2011 Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture, and most recently, the 2021 Frederic M. Jablin Award from the International Communication Association for Outstanding Contributions to Organizational Communication. Today, Brenda is in conversation with Karen Ashcraft. They are coming up on 30 years of precious collaboration. Here is Karen!
Hello, it is my pleasure today to speak with Dr. Brenda J. Allen. Welcome.
Thank you so much, Karen.
I'm wondering if you could tell those of us who don't know about your educational history and how that or any relevant aspects of your personal history might have shaped your choice to pursue a PhD and become an educator?
I think I will go all the way back to elementary school and even preschool, where I was raised in the projects of Youngstown, Ohio, in the 1950s. In elementary school, I was labeled as a smart little colored girl by all-white teachers. I always have loved learning and then fast forward to junior high school, as well as my high school, it was half students that would probably be labeled as white, half students will be labeled as colored or black. Among all of those students for AP classes, there was one colored girl and one colored boy. I was the colored girl. Eventually, we started calling ourselves black. As I went on to high school, I felt very comfortable and confident among my white peers. And I also felt very comfortable and confident among my black peers. In high school, I was not encouraged by teachers or staff to go to college. Fortunately, I took both college prep and secretarial classes in terms of trying to be prepared and based on conflicting messages I was receiving about what I should aspire to. I took my cues from my white peers and I won the city-wide scholarship, which is a full ride to any institution. Because of my limited knowledge and understanding, I just applied to one, Case Western Reserve University. I took a class in voice and diction and loved it. We translated people speaking with different accents, and I had a knack for that. So I earned my undergrad degree in speech pathology, but I really did not want to be a speech pathologist. I moved back to Youngstown, Ohio, where I got a job as an elementary school librarian. As a librarian, however, I became very bored, very a sense of what am I doing with my life, etc. Having this lifelong commitment to education and learning, I decided I would go to grad school. And I decided I wanted to go to a historically black institution because I never had a black teacher, a black faculty member, etc. So I chose Howard University. The only degree they had at the masters level that my degree in speech pathology fit with was a brand new area called organizational communication. I earned that degree and was recruited to CU Boulder by Phillip Tompkins in 1989. Phil heard about me through one of his former students from Purdue, Patricia Cutspec. She invited me to meet Phil, who invited me to apply for the position. And that's how I became an Assistant Professor in the tenure track.
Thank you for that. You've hinted Phil Tompkins, Patricia, who would you regard as someone who is an extraordinary mentor of so many in the field? Who would you regard as your mentors? And also anything you remember in terms of memorable messages or moments with those people?
I think I want to go back to a point I alluded to, which is, I really did not have many formal mentors, because I wasn't even aware of this idea of having mentors. I see so many up-and-coming. And based on that I can identify Phil Tompkins as a crucial person who served in a really powerful mentoring relationship for me from the time that he recruited to the time that I moved to Boulder. As well as thinking about memorable moments, I remember, when I came up for tenure at the University of Colorado Boulder, the Dean of the College under which our department was housed, informed the chair who was a different person than Phil that I would probably not make it through tenure, despite the fact that my Department had voted unanimously. So after the Chair of the Department told me about this and actually invited, offered to give me two more years to prove myself, when I graciously declined that offer and basically said, either they believe I've earned tenure or not, and just like I got this job, I can get another job. I immediately went to Phil's office to tell him what had happened. And there was a memorable moment with Phil, in which he said, “Okay, so we've got to now reiterate our commitment. And since we submitted your dossier, you've published something else.” He just outlined what to do next, in a way that eventually when I became a Department chair and an Associate Dean, as well as even as I've continued to help people put together dossiers, etc. That was a memorable moment. Patty Cutspec, and now Patty Breidenstein, was pivotal. When it looked like I wasn't doing very well in terms of getting published. The department invited me to choose two mentors formally. So I chose Karen Tracy and Bob Craig and they were phenomenal. I said to them, give me feedback, double- barreled. Karen Tracy, when I got my first rejection letter, I took it to her for publication. Similar with Bob Craig, in terms of providing opportunities, engaging me, encouraging me in terms of what I had to offer. You currently are one of my mentors as well. I think we have a phenomenal mutual mentoring relationship, which is something I really encourage others to understand. Everyone can benefit from these relationships. Those are just a few that I can think about in terms of mentors and informal mentoring relationships, some memorable moments within the discipline. There are other scholars, though, that really influenced my thinking, including you, including Patrice Buzzanell, Dennis Mumby, Patricia Hill-Collins, Mark Orbe, Michel Foucault, John T. Warren, crucial in terms of critical communication pedagogy, Dennis Mumby, Kimberly Crenshaw, Patricia Collins. When people get an award, and they're trying to name everybody that happens, but these are the ones that really come to mind for me.
What a great list and the shouts out to people who have made such an impact on your scholarship. So you're widely known as a founding scholar in this area of research. Can you tell us how you would describe the area, difference studies, and what this means to you, and how you came to be interested in it?
I came to CU Boulder in hopes of becoming a scholar of computer-mediated communication. And I was completing my long-term doctoral program at Howard University, in their school of communication under the umbrella of organizational communication. I was also patching together a living working at various institutions of higher education in the DC metro area. And that included teaching evenings at community colleges. One evening I was teaching a voice and diction class to adult learners, and I said “I gotta do some research at some organization. I'm looking at computers and communication. Anybody have any ideas”. So this woman raised her hand, and she was the executive assistant to the head of technology at PBS corporate headquarters in Alexandria. She said, “I think my boss would let you come do some work for us”. So I went to PBS. And they gave me carte blanche to create a research project about a burgeoning technology they were employing. I designed a triangulated project, my primary question was “Is there a relationship between the organization's culture and how they adopt communication technology? And that technology was electronic mail.” So I found indeed, there was a powerful connection between PBS and how that organization adopted email. So I was concluding that research when I got the invitation to interview at CU Boulder. Came there, with all hopes of that being my career area, partially because I love disarming people who did not expect me to say that my area of scholarship is computer-mediated communication, because I'm black and a woman and also encountered that attitude when I got to CU Boulder those expectations that I did work in gender, work in ethnicity. That's how I begin to look at issues of difference, especially gender, and race, because I was intrigued and somewhat amazed by ways that people viewed me, the assumptions people need about me. In an act of what I later learned to label resistance and in some way seeming to become complicit, I decided to become that which people assumed I was, which is a scholar who looked at in particular gender and race in goal-oriented social collectivities. It was really feminist work and work on women, specifically more than gender by the way, was beginning to develop. And so I just decided I would start doing that, because it fascinated me.
What about the study of difference in organizational communication has moved you, inspired you, delighted you? What has puzzled you, frustrated you?
I will start with my own aha moments of coming to CU Boulder in Boulder, Colorado from Howard University in Washington DC as a non-traditional doctoral candidate. And the ways that people responded to me, the way that I realized what I had gotten into, in terms of being on the tenure track, began to critique the theories etc, in organizational communication. Some of my colleagues encouraged me to offer those critiques and begin to write and talk about them. But more than anything, think about them and process them. One of the things that we had to do at that time on that faculty is we had to teach a critical thinking course. So when it came my time to teach critical thinking, I realized I didn't want to just have it as this topic up here. I want to connect it to something real that people can relate to. So I decided to focus the critical thinking course on race. And in doing that, that was a pivotal moment when I realized my gosh, so many different things related to social constructionism. There's more to this notion of thinking about ourselves, and how we share meaning with one another and goal-oriented social collectivities. And I ended up thinking about it as difference as opposed to diversity. Also I conceptualize difference in ways that differ from some other theoretical perspectives. It quite simply is ways that human beings differ from one another. Difference matters for everyone, even as difference matters differently for different people. And difference is complex. It’s highly contextual. And with all of that, then I've seen some progress of moving on thinking differences is not the same as diversity. They're connected. Understanding that difference consists of a wide variety of social identities that also can be very contextual, historically, locally, in the moment. I've seen some of those changes and moving beyond looking first at gender and then maybe gender and race, as well as really attending to intersectionality in ways that Kimberle Crenshaw framed. It may be quite acceptable that intersections made me more about overlapping than how I tend to frame it and be consistent with Kimberle Crenshaw. It's with multiple non-dominant identities and the impacts of that, so I'm seeing some growth along those words. I remain frustrated that too often people are talking about race, but they don't want to name it. Too often people think of talking about difference means you're only talking about the non-dominant categories of any social identities. Too often people want a formula or three steps, rather than taking you know my three S's: a strategic systemic and sustainable approach to this work.
How would you describe your major contributions to the field? You already mentioned your three S's: strategic, systemic, sustainable. What are some of the ways that you have challenged us to think and do differently?
I feel extremely positive that my impact is far-reaching, in terms of a variety of concepts in my book: Difference Matters, which has taken off in ways I just would not have imagined. People are still finding it very impactful and it's very much related to what I learned and what I value about being an organizational communication scholar. I have a course on Coursera, which is an online learning platform, global. And I've been extremely rewarded with folks from around the world in a wide variety of positions, talking about the positive impact going through that course with me has made on their lives. Even as I was reading some of the work in that volume, hearing people cite me or seeing people cite me. I think that happens a lot. However, my concern there is you can cite me and cite my work. But so what now? What's really happening? What I would hope would happen within organizational communication as an area of scholarship in terms of how, and I'll say we are inviting, encouraging, and helping students advance within that area of study, whether they are confirmed majors or introductory courses. I also would encourage to consider the complexities of social identity, power dynamics, how communication constitutes that, and inviting, encouraging modeling for students and among ourselves how that works. What's crucial is to perhaps start or continue with some inventory of really getting some clarity about the work that has been done and what might be feasible and usable from within that. Patricia Parker and Jamie McDonald wrote a chapter about Difference, Diversity and Inclusion in the edited volume Movements in Organizational Communication Research. They share compelling stories. They trace the history of research in those areas, and they offer intriguing ideas for future research. There's a lot of things that have already been done. We don't have to totally construct, thinking about architecture.
I know you've enjoyed writing in different voices and venues over time. Could you talk about what your favorite article, essay, book, project is?
I want to start with Twice Blessed, Doubly Oppressed: Women of Color in Academia. Without me even knowing it, I was invoking that notion of intersectionality. Then there was, “Diversity”; and organizational communication, published in the Journal of Applied Communication Research. Those are two. Then and related to this was my feminism and organizational communication coordinate, black woman's (re)view of organizational socialization. That's where I took my experiences with some theories about socialization. I talked about some of the elements of socialization theories and frameworks with my relatively limited, relevant scholarly background, and those became really fundamental. Then our article, The Racial Foundation of Organizational Communication. You invited us to do that critique. You modeled for me, this idea on feminism. Then you invited us to take a look at our textbooks at that time, and how they were dealing specifically with race, and even the process of eventually getting that published. I guess that's a key point as well for people in the field, to reflect on what have been your related experiences when it comes to the things we routinely do related to valuing others, and also beginning to frame and conceptualize that in ways that are valuable, useful, practical, in a wide variety of contexts. And the final one, it’s Difference Matters, and the genesis of that being that I'd had those experiences of teaching race, and critical thinking, to historic at a historically white institution to primarily white students, inviting all of us to think about how race mattered. I'm so amazed at, and impressed with the knowledge, the wisdom, and the way that I invite people. I'm very thoughtful and heartfelt about helping people understand I grappled with these issues, too. I think people assume that they're going to hear mainly from me about how I have felt discriminated against and my struggles.
You present in many different contexts, and it always seems like you bring a lot of that dynamic self to the room, and that you're experiencing genuine connection and pleasure in the process. Could you describe your philosophy and practice as a presenter and facilitator? How have you become this?
I believe it goes all the way back when I was a little kid, and ways that people responded to me, and lifted me up. From anything of being in Sunday school, or for Easter program, needing to recite something to be in a little school plays, of people really responded favorably to how I presented. Then I actually taught public speaking as one of my jobs, and I also did a CD-ROM textbook on public speaking. It was an invitation for me to think about those ways of presenting. Then how people have responded to me from then until now that I began to ask people “This sounds great!”. I was like, “So what was great about it.” Genuinely wanting to understand what was happening for folks. I began to become much more conscientious in a positive way to serve what I was doing in engaging with people. I strive to really be there, no matter who the audience is, no matter what's going on.
Could we close with a question that suits this podcast, which is architects of communication? You are an architect of communication, what have you built?
I have provided a rich variety of actual artifacts that people could refer to, they could draw upon, so they could create their own in their own way. Another one is using our privilege for good, and thinking about systemic strategic and sustainable work as much as one can, thinking about with our architects. I would love for, to have recognizable whether people know that I did it or not, but also have an emulator reproduced or versions of it. For me, that would be a part of the success of an architect.
I am so grateful for your friendship, for your mind, and your presence in this field and well beyond it. So grateful for this conversation today.
Best wishes to anyone who listens to this. I issued this invitation and it's genuine to contact me if I might be of assistance in anyone who also is striving to be an architect.
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network and is sponsored by The Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Our producer is Lacie Yao. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description.
