Each semester, the UConn Department of Communication welcomes expert guest lecturers to share insights and research from across the field of communication.
Dr. Alexandra Paxton – Tuesday, November 29th, 2022
Talk Description
Most of us intuitively recognize the flow and connectedness of social interaction, but that fundamental reality can be overlooked in scholarly research. In my talk, I will discuss the view of interpersonal communication as a complex dynamical system. Dynamical systems theory provides an avenue for scholars to embrace the messy reality of communication, both theoretically and analytically. By viewing communication as a complex dynamical system, we can quantify the ways in which communication changes according to context (including goals, physical spaces, and relationships) and over time (and across timescales), along with the emergent properties of the communication system (including the ties between communicating individuals’ behavior, cognition, and emotion). To illustrate this idea, I will present a series of studies in dynamical systems perspective in real-world and experimental settings.
Bio
Dr Paxton’s work focuses on improving our understanding of communication and interaction with a data-rich and complex-systems approach, particularly in how context changes behavior. Her research interests include: Communication and social interaction as a complex dynamical system (including movement, language, attention, and emotion), data-rich and dynamics-focused research methods and analyses, naturally occurring datasets and “big data” for psychological theory-building, and ethics of human-derived data.
Hilary Kraus, MSI – Tuesday, October 25th, 2022
Bio
Hilary Kraus, MSI, is the Research Services Librarian at the University of Connecticut and the subject specialist for the fields of Psychological Sciences and Kinesiology. She has served as a health sciences and science librarian at Loyola University Chicago and DePaul University, and most recently as Nursing & Health Librarian at UMass Dartmouth. Hilary holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Northwestern University and an MS in Information Science from the University of Michigan. A Chicago native, she relocated to New England in 2008. In her spare time, she is an avid reader and crafter.