Kate Hawkins

For Hawkins, scholarship means collaboration

When Katherine Hawkins of Wichita State University received the Southern States Communication Association’s gender studies scholar of the year award in San Antonio last month, someone didn’t just stand up, make a short speech, and hand her a plaque. Instead, she was interviewed about her scholarship, a much more collaborative mode of communication. And, for Hawkins, the collaboration was appropriate, as such collaboration is what she has emphasized during her research career.

“It’s important that our work be relevant, that it applies to a community in ways that are meaningful to the members of that community,” Hawkins insisted. Not only that, but Hawkins is committed to working to reveal how community members deal with those who are “other” than themselves. To do so, Hawkins and her collaborators, many of them students, combine traditional social science methods with a critical consciousness to expose how public messages are targeted toward certain groups.

For example, Hawkins has done research on how middle-school-aged girls make decisions to start smoking, especially since most of these girls will express negative attitudes toward smoking while in elementary school. She’s examined advertising messages for cigarettes and found that, from the perspective of these young women, cigarettes are sold as “making you pretty,” or as “helping you control your weight.” Hawkins hopes that by making these underlying messages salient and helping the young women to find resistance strategies will result in fewer young women making the decision to smoke. With student Tami Bradley, she is also looking at how urban and rural audiences respond to an anti-smoking campaign called, “Let’s Take It Outside.”

Currently Hawkins is involved in several projects with her graduate and undergraduate students. These projects include:

	A study, with Mary Thompson, of a Head Start program. These programs have been told to “increase parental involvement,” by the Federal Government, but Thompson and Hawkins found that there is disagreement on what “parental involvement” means to the various constituencies of the Head Start program they studied. They are currently working with the program to help resolve those differences.
	A study, with Jolinda Ramsey, on differences between male and female perceptions of news stories. Children were shown tapes of news stories being read by a male or a female broadcaster. The children rated the female broadcaster as being more credible, possibly because she exhibited fewer disfluencies than did the male. There were no differences in credibility ratings given by boys and girls, suggesting that the children used factors other than gender to attribute credibility to the newscaster.
	A study, with Kari Olson, of the rhetoric of the “Promise Keepers” and a companion group, the “Suitable Helpers.” This study attempts to compare the rhetoric of these groups with a general picture of the rhetoric of the Christian Right, to see where these groups are similar and where they differ.
	A study, with Christopher Power, of question-asking behavior in small groups. Previous research has indicated that men and women tend to ask about the same number of questions in task-oriented small groups, but we know little about the content of those questions. Analyses of data for this study have indicated that women’s questions tend to be more probing than those of men.

Hawkins, who is serving this year as chair of NCA’s Feminist and Women Studies Division, is concerned that gender studies scholarship is still not part of the mainstream of scholarship in communication, at least when measured by what gets published in the journals devoted to general communication research. She also bemoaned the difficulties that various gender groups have in communicating with each other, particularly white women and women of color. Sighing, she said, “We have not yet learned how to speak across that divide.”

Still, she professed to love the collaborations her research has afforded her. “Research as a solitary activity is not a lot of fun,” she said. And, when the research results can be used for social change, the work is that much more rewarding.