Research

The acts of professional athletes who have “taken a knee” during the playing of the national anthem during sport events reflect something more than a momentary message was being sent by the players, research by Dan Grano suggests. Grano, an associate professor in communication studies who researches public advocacy and sports communication and culture, says, “It’s a different moment in the history of sport.”

UNC Charlotte researcher Roslyn Mickelson is providing context for a debate about legislation to allow towns near Charlotte to create charter schools. She is drawing from her decades’ long research into segregation and re-segregation of schools and commenting in local and national media accounts.

Faculty authors in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at UNC Charlotte in 2017 edited and published 42 books that were diverse in topic ranging from language and culture studies to physics and optical science. Texts also included topics such as public relations, history, religious studies, and African American studies. The books included textbooks, research publications, novels, and other forms.

For couples seeking to overcome infertility, the process can prove emotionally and financially daunting. At the same time, those who care about them can struggle to know how to show support. A new documentary created by graduate students in a visual ethnography class in UNC Charlotte’s Department of Communication Studies offers insights to the couples and their loved ones.

For the first time, researchers have evidence of exactly what dads are doing while moms are taking care of housework or tending to their child. A study by Jill Yavorsky, assistant professor of sociology at UNC Charlotte, and colleagues at The Ohio State University, found men were most often relaxing while women did housework or child care.

For the first time, researchers have evidence of exactly what dads are doing while moms are taking care of housework or tending to their child. A study by Jill Yavorsky, assistant professor of sociology at UNC Charlotte, and colleagues at The Ohio State University, found men were most often relaxing while women did housework or […]

On a journey through the restaurants and kitchens of the South, the linkage between food and identity came clear to Ashli Quesinberry Stokes, a communication studies associate professor and director of the Center for the Study of the New South. She and her colleague, Wendy Atkins-Sayre, faculty at the University of Southern Mississippi, have co-authored a compelling book that details their findings.

Professor Richard Tedeschi and fellow researcher Lawrence Calhoun, UNC Charlotte emeritus professor in psychology, years ago coined the phrase “posttraumatic growth” to describe what they have witnessed – that some people will grow and change in new ways after they undergo trauma. Their work has continued to grow and evolve, as they find new avenues of research, gain new collaborators, mentor new students and influence authors of popular press books and researchers.

Call him an earth sleuth. Wenwu Tang, assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, scoops up information from a targeted locale and analyzes it for clues to address any number of societal problems with a spatial component. With his research, Tang looks at land use, land cover change, how traffic patterns may influence transportation, how pedestrians or animals may move in an area or even how disease may spread.

In her book, “Thomas Wolfe and Lost Children in Southern Literature,” scholar Paula Gallant Eckard calls upon Thomas Wolfe’s evocative and autobiographical novella “The Lost Boy” as a touchstone for her analysis of a group of contemporary southern novels. She draws upon her writing and research to enliven learning for her students.