Putting crip in the script: A critical communication pedagogical study of communication theory textbooks

Putting crip in the script: A critical communication pedagogical study of communication theory textbooks

This critical communication pedagogy study consists of a cripistemological analysis of two prominent communication theory textbooks to better understand the nondisableist assumptions embedded within these textbooks and, by extension, our field’s theories. Conceiving of the university classroom as an educational cultural performance, this study positions these textbooks to be scripts. Imitating the vignette-to-application format found in these communication theory textbooks, the study offers three new vignettes that center disability. Each vignette provides new insight into its corresponding communication theory: uncertainty reduction theory, sensemaking theory, and structuration theory. By inflecting the crip, the corresponding analyses provide lessons into the enactment of our theories within the educational cultural performances of our classrooms. Each is told from a crip perspective that rescripts compulsory nondisableist discourses to better understand crip as humanity, as evolutionarily superior, and as universal. This study helps model how to explore, explain, and refute embedded nondisableist assumptions within and across our field’s knowledge bases, as found in textbooks.

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Makkawy, A., & Moreman, S. T. (2019). Putting crip in the script: A critical communication pedagogical study of communication theory textbooks. Communication Education, 68(4), 401–416.