Ronald L. Jackson II (Ph. D., Howard University) is Associate Professor of Culture and Communication Theory in the Department of Communication Arts & Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University. He is author of The Negotiation of Cultural Identity (Praeger Press), Think About It! (Iuniverse.com), African American Communication: Identity and Culture (with Michael Hecht and Sidney Ribeau; Erlbaum Publishers). Forthcoming are five books entitled: African American Rhetorics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (with Elaine Richardson; Southern Illinois University Press); Scripting the Black Masculine Body in Popular Media: Identity, Discourse and Racial Politics in Popular Media (SUNY Press), Essential Readings in African American Communication Studies and Understanding African American Rhetoric (with Elaine Richardson). Dr. Jackson’s theory work includes the development of two paradigms coined “cultural contracts theory” and "black masculine identity theory."
Sonja M. Brown Givens is Assistant Professor of Interpersonal Communication in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Her research interests include the influence of mass mediated portrayals of socially marginalized groups on social decision making processes. Her collaborative work appears in Quarterly Journal of Speech with Dr. Celeste Condit from the University of Georgia. Her latest manuscript entitled “Mammies, Jezebels, and other controlling imagery: An examination of the influence of televised stereotypes of perceptions of an African American woman” is currently under review for Media Psychology. Works in progress include a manuscript entitled “Coping from the margins: The intersection of race, gender, spirituality and professional identity in African American graduate student experiences” which is currently being prepared for submission to Western Journal of Communication.
