Institute For Faculty Development Recap

Keddo, Maddox, Ochieng, Rauchberg, Soriano, and Tracy Lead 2025 Faculty Development Institute 

For only the second time in more than 50 years, and the first time since the COVID pandemic, this year’s NCA Institute for Faculty Development was held July 7-11 online (Zoom), allowing about 60 faculty members from the USA and other countries to participate. (When the Institute has been held in person, it typically has been capped at 30 attendees.) It was hosted by Duquesne University. 

The Zoom format allowed and required a different approach to the Institute than in past years, when content was divided into two or more sessions during the week in a “short course” type of arrangement. This year, each short course was contained within one three-hour session, with attendees being able to interact individually both in Q&A time during the session and also in designated “Office Hours” periods. 

The Institute’s sessions were: “Crafting Meaningful Qualitative Research: Enhancing Inquiry, Rigor and Resonance in an AI-Integrated Era,” by Sarah Tracy, Arizona State University; “Mediated Work: Communication, Power in the Gig Economy,” by Cheryll Ruth Soriano, De La Salle University, the Philippines; “Teaching About Digital Media in the Age of the Creator: Platforms, Power, and Identity,” by Jess Rauchberg, Seton Hall University; “The Cyclical Nature of Diversity in the Cultural Industries,” by Nessa Keddo, King’s College London, England; “Introduction to Africana Philosophy and Rhetoric,” by Omedi Ochieng, University of Colorado, Boulder; and “Teaching With/To Social Media: Bringing Internet Culture and Social Media Platforms into the Classroom,” by Jessica Maddox, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. 

Tracy (PhD, University of Colorado) is a professor of qualitative methodology and organizational communication in The Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. Tracy is internationally recognized for her award-winning work on emotion, identity, and organizational life. She is the author of Qualitative Research Methods: Collecting Evidence, Crafting Analysis, Communicating Impact and the creator of the “Big Tent” criteria for excellent qualitative research. Her workshops are designed to help researchers craft studies that are practical, resonant, meaningful, and ethically grounded. 

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.  

Soriano 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.  

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. 

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.  

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. 

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.  

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, 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. 

This year’s Institute organizers were Katherine Thweatt, SUNY Oswego; Janie M. Harden, Duquesne University; and Ryan D’Souza, Chatham University.