Teaching Focus
I teach undergraduate courses in visual communication, namely COMM1300 Visual Communication and COMM3350 Presenting Information Visually. The first course steeps students in a visual language and analytical framework for understanding how and what images communicate, which they then apply to a variety of artifacts and contexts. The second course hones students’ practical skills in creating visual artifacts drawing upon theory and research from communication, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, human factors, and design. My own research is nicely intertwined with these topics; for example, I showed how use of computer simulation visualizations of automotive crashes changed how engineering work was divided worldwide for a large vehicle manufacturer. At the graduate level, I teach seminars in my research area of technology, work, and organization; I also initiated a writing seminar. In the past, I taught a method seminar in organizational ethnography.
Research Focus
Most working adults spend more time at work than they do at any other life activity, and they typically conduct their tasks at work using a wide range of technologies. Consequently, the technologies that we use at work may play a large role not just in much of what we do every day, but how we come to think of ourselves, our skills, our contributions, and our interactions with others. As a scholar of technology, work, and organization, I examine how people select technologies to use at work, how they employ technologies in their everyday tasks, and what happens when they do. I pay particular attention to changes in such matters as work practices, occupational knowledge and learning, the global division of labor, the form and role of work artifacts and objects, and organizational and occupational status, power, and identity. My interests center on digitized artifacts and computational technologies, including most recently those found in artificial intelligence and precision agriculture. With an expertise in organizational ethnography, I conduct primarily large-scale, team-based empirical studies that draw heavily upon in-person observations and interviews of people at work to yield rich, finely detailed data for analysis. My resulting publications lie in the realm of organizational communication and organization studies research.
