Dr. Crystal Park  – Tuesday, November 28th, 2023

Talk Description

This talk will first discuss how spirituality can be conceptualized, and then utilize a meaning-making framework to explore the various ways spirituality is related to health. Research findings from the presenter’s studies, including those of cancer survivors and people living with heart failure, will illustrate these linkages.

Bio 

Crystal Park is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at UCONN. Her research focuses on multiple aspects of coping, including the roles of religious/spiritual resources, the phenomenon of perceived stress-related growth, and the making of meaning in the context of traumatic events and life-threatening illnesses, including cancer survivorship and heart failure. Her yoga-related research focuses on the mechanisms through which yoga may affect health and wellbeing and reduce stress, particularly through its fostering of healthier emotion regulation. She is currently the co-principal investigator of an NIH-funded study on the mechanisms of action and of an NIH-funded research network, Mind-Body Measures and Mechanisms of Emotional Wellbeing. She maintains an active research lab, the Spirituality, Meaning, and Health Lab, which is open to both graduate and undergraduate students, and directs the Health Psychology Certificate Program. 

Dr. Michelle A. Holling – Tuesday, October 17th, 2023

Talk Description 

This presentation explores how a rhetorical ecological approach can aid scholars in examining the rhetorical dynamics of coalition building. This approach is based on conducting rhetorical fieldwork with the grassroots community-based Friends of Friendship Park, as well as at Friendship Park, a binational park situated on the San Diego-Tijuana border. Through her research (and that of her co-author Diane Keeling), Dr. Holling advances a rhetorical ecology understanding of “coalition” that is shaped by a diversity of enclaves, memories, and inventional resources.” 

Bio 

Dr. Holling is Professor of Rhetoric at California State University, San Marcos. Her scholarly, teaching, and service commitments are guided by matters of voice, marginality, and identity that anchor in a concern for and dedication to social justice. She is an award-winning scholar who specializes in Chicana/o-Latina/o rhetoric, with additional areas of expertise including race, rhetoric, and violence; testimonio and gendered violence; and women of color in academia, as well as intersectional microaggressions. She has co-edited “Race(ing) Intercultural Communication: Racial Logics in a Colorblind Era” with Dr. Dreama Moon and “Latina/o Discourse in Vernacular Spaces: Somos de Una Voz?” with Dr. Bernadette Calafell.

Professionally, she founded the Communication, Identities, and Difference interest group in the Western States Communication Association (WSCA). She is also a past-president of WSCA and the Organization for Research on Women and Communication. Her leadership also includes being chair of the Communication Department and director of the Ethnic Studies Program. She also serves on several journal editorial boards, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Women’s Studies in Communication, and Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, among others. Currently, she serves on the board of directors for the GriffinHarte Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting civil conversations in communities, conducting research, and providing education.