2025 Institute for Faculty Development hosted by Duquesne University

The 2025 NCA Institute for Faculty Development (IFFD), formerly known as the “Hope Conference,” will be held virtually (on Zoom) July 7-11, organized and hosted by Duquesne University of Pittsburgh. The general purpose of the IFFD is to stay abreast of ongoing changes and issues in communication theory and research, with an eye to enriching instructional insights and practices. This five-day conference offers participants an opportunity to network with fellow undergraduate scholar-teachers and learn from and with leading scholars in the field.

Planned workshop topics include communication technologies/creator economy; organizational communication/platformization; digital creator economy; Africana philosophy & rhetoric, rhetorical theory & comparative intellectual history; research methods; impact of digital world on culture and labor, and more.

Up to 60 participants will be able to attend FREE on a first-come, first-served basis. Attendees must be current NCA members. To register, please complete the registration form. The application deadline will be 11:59 p.m., May 31. Application requirements and procedures will be announced soon. Questions regarding the IFFD may be directed to Dr. Janie Harden Fritz, Dr. Katherine S. Thweatt, or Ryan D’Souza.

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Meet the Facilitators

Nessa Keddo

Associate Professor in Media, Diversity and Technology

King’s College London

Dr Nessa Keddo is an Associate Professor in Media, Diversity and Technology in the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. Dr Keddo is Programme Director for MA Global Media Industries and the Department’s EDI Lead. She is a Co-Lead on Wellcome Trust funded project INKLUDE – a King’s wide project focused on embedding inclusive leadership across the College. Her research broadly addresses how the media industries are responding and adapting to socio-political discourses surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). More recently with the onset of digitization, Dr Keddo explores how digital cultures, datafication and AI is increasing inequities for marginalized practitioners in various job capacities.

Dr Keddo’s research is grounded in critical approaches to the embedding of diversity practices and discourse in the media industries, specifically in advertising and marketing professions. More specifically, her work interrogates how diversity is superficially adopted in many cases, exploring whose voices are prioritized in organizational decision-making. More recently with the integration of automated praxis, Dr Keddo’s work explores digital cultures, automation, and the affordances and challenges of digitized labor for marginalized practitioners and independent creators (Keddo, 2024). Her work supports strategic direction for organizations mitigating diversity within their operations, including how AI and data tools are transforming processes. She has published research exploring the experiences of Black and racialized workers, including upcoming book “Race, Racism and Diversity in the Cultural and Creative Industries” (Routledge, 2025). In 2023/2024, Dr Keddo was Co-Investigator of AHRC funded project “Transforming the Gap: Inclusive Digital Arts and Humanities Research Skills”, which included a series of co-designed workshops with underrepresented researchers and practitioners for improving inclusive practices with digital tools. Dr Keddo has run several international events bringing policy makers, academics and industry experts together to critically interrogate AI, datafication and diversity practice across professional occupations.

Jess Maddox

Associate Professor

University of Alabama

Jessica Maddox (Ph.D., University of Georgia) is an Associate Professor of Digital Media at the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on content creators, influencers, and social media platforms, and has been published in over a dozen top-tier peer-reviewed journals. She is the author of The Internet is for Cats: How Animal Images Shape our Digital Lives (Rutgers University Press, 2023) and the author of the in-progress work, Anatomy of an Internet Scandal: Content Creators and the Politics of Going Viral (forthcoming, University of California Press). She has been featured in over two hundred news articles, podcasts, op-eds, and more about social media phenomena. She has also consulted on social media child labor laws throughout the United States.

Maddox is a scholar at the intersection of pop culture and labor on the internet. Her work in these areas is influenced by Media Studies, Critical-Cultural Studies, and mass communication more broadly. She thinks of social media as pop culture in Stuart Hall’s sense, in that the relationship between social media users, platform and the tech industry, and creators and influencers are sites of social, political, and economic struggle. In-progress work in this area includes how the press upholds the tech industry’s pivot to AI as inevitable, the politics of the moniker “influencer,” and a digital ethnography of child influencer content.

Omedi Ochieng

Associate Professor

University of Colorado Boulder

Omedi Ochieng specializes in Africana philosophy & rhetoric, rhetorical theory & criticism, and radical theory. He is the author of two books: Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life: Politics and Ethics at the Intersection of North Atlantic and African Philosophy (Routledge: 2017) and The Intellectual Imagination: Knowledge and Aesthetics in North Atlantic and African Philosophy (University of Notre Dame Press: 2018). Ochieng has been published in numerous journals, including Philosophy & Rhetoric, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Western Journal of Communication, and Radical Philosophy.

Ochieng’s most recent work explores Black radical ideas on ecology. Specifically, he argues that insurgencies are wellsprings of inventive ideas and practices about how to live in the era of climate collapse, ascendant authoritarianism, pandemics, and global immiseration. The project’s stakes are twofold. First, it seeks to unfold a politics, ethics, and culture adequate to the racial capitalocene. Second, it aims at a thoroughgoing critique of rhetorical studies that issues in an intellectual commitment to a planetary and abolitionist imagination.

Jess Rauchberg

Assistant Professor of Communication Technology

Seton Hall University

Dr. Jess Rauchberg (Ph.D., McMaster) is an assistant professor of communication technologies at Seton Hall University, where her scholarship is supported by a Microsoft Research grant. Rauchberg’s research and teaching broadly focuses on inequalities and visibility in the creator economy, with attention to disability, race, and gender. She is a founding member of the Content Creator Scholars Network and a global member of the TikTok Cultures Research Network. This is her first time participating in the National Communication Association’s (U.S.) Institute for Faculty Development.

Rauchberg’s research centers the creator economy, a large, multi-platform global market consisting of workers who use digital platforms to share creative practices and sell products and ideas to audiences. Only in its second decade, the creator economy is currently estimated to hold a 250 billion USD net worth. Notwithstanding, the creator economy is also unregulated and shaped by economic precarity and offline oppression. Drawing from the tradition of feminist media studies, Rauchberg’s work pays keen detail to the entwined relationships between ableism, misogyny, racism, and classism in how they shape digital cultural production and the future of work. Using humanistic and critical qualitative methods, she examines how (in)visibility, credibility, and authenticity frame marginalized creators and their labour. Her work appears in Q1 journals such as New Media & Society, the Journal of Gender Studies, and Feminist Media Studies, among others. A public-facing scholar, Rauchberg has written for The Conversation (Canada), and her expertise is quoted in over 25 media appearances, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Good Morning America, PBS, and BBC. She has previously facilitated pedagogical workshops on the creator economy and generative artificial intelligence for Microsoft Research.

Cheryll Ruth Soriano

Professor and Research Fellow

De La Salle University, Philippines

Cheryll Ruth Soriano is a Professor and Research Fellow at De La Salle University. She is actively engaged in global, regional, and national research networks on platformization and digital labor. Her work explores how platforms are embedded within social, technological, and economic processes, as well as how platformization shapes working conditions and labor organizing, particularly in global majority contexts. Her recent publications examine how workers navigate platform capitalism—expressing agency, resistance, and solidaristic responses while engaging with community, kinship relations, and local power dynamics. Her current research investigates the intersections of labor platformization with finance and social platforms, analyzing the cultural economies that both enable and are shaped by digital labor.

Cheryll is the Principal Investigator of Fairwork Philippines (2021–present) and a Partner-Investigator in the eight-country project Digital Transaction Platforms in Asia (2022–present). Beginning February 2025, she leads an interdisciplinary action research project under FutureWORKSAsia on the intersections of platform labor and climate change in the Philippines. Her books are Philippine Digital Cultures: Brokerage Dynamics on YouTube (Amsterdam University Press, with E. Cabalquinto) and Asian Perspectives on Digital Culture: Emerging Phenomena, Enduring Concepts (Routledge, with S.S. Lim). She is one of the founding editors of the journal Platforms & Society and the new book series Power Currents: Asian Media in the World (University of Pittsburgh Press). Cheryll serves on the Advisory Board of mediastudies.press and the Southeast Asia Center for Digital Tech and Society (SEADS). She is a member of the International Panel for the Information Environment and previously served as International Liaison for the International Communication Association’s Philosophy, Theory, and Critique Division.

Sarah J. Tracy

School Director and Professor

Arizona State University Sarah J. Tracy is an organizational communication scholar and full professor in Arizona State University’s Hugh Downs School of Human Communication. Tracy earned a B.A. in 1993 from the University of Southern California, and received her Master of Arts and Ph.D. degrees in communication from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she was advised by Stanley A. Deetz. While at Colorado, she became a co-author with Deetz and Jennifer Lyn Simpson of the book Leading Organizations through Transition: Communication and Cultural Change (Sage Publications, 1999). Her doctoral thesis on Emotional labor and correctional officers: A study of emotion norms, performance and unintended consequences in a total institution (2000) won the National Communication Association’s Miller Dissertation Award. She joined the ASU faculty in 2000. Dr. Tracy’s communication scholarship examines emotion and identity within organizations, with a focus on workplace bullying, emotional labor, occupational burnout, and work-life balance. Through the use of qualitative research, such as participant observation, in-depth interviewing, focus groups, and discourse analysis, her ethnographic studies investigate targets of workplace bullying, male executives, correctional officers, 911 emergency call-takers, public relations professionals, and cruise ship activity coordinators. Tracy designs and conducts her research in an attempt to provide new information and knowledge that can potentially improve organizational environments and the everyday lives of men and women. (From Wikipedia)