Heidi Hatfield Edwards, associate dean at the College of Psychology and Liberal Arts and professor and head, School of Arts and Communication, had a busy summer.
In July, she presented “Practical Strategies for Crafting Effective Narratives” to the Space Coast chapter of the Florida Public Relations Association. Held at the county’s new Emergency Operations Center, the event was a professional development opportunity for FPRA members.
Storytelling is central to public communication, Edwards notes, and understanding how to craft a narrative is an essential component in the communicator’s toolkit. During her presentation she discussed why storytelling is effective in getting messages to the public and ways to do so successfully.
The presentation reflects Edwards’ research, which focuses on communication and social issues. She is a senior research fellow with the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication and with Fuyuan Shen recently published the book Narratives in Public Communication, a collection of studies funded through their Page Center project.
A recently published paper from Edwards and School of Arts and Communication colleagues YJ Sohn and Ted Petersen examined a darker aspect of communication – misinformation and disinformation.
Published online in the journal Kybernetes, “Deciphering misinformation and disinformation: insights from structural coupling and penetration,” explored “the distinct origins, mechanisms, growth paths and societal impacts of misinformation and disinformation through the theoretical lens of Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory, particularly focusing on structural coupling and penetration.”
The authors found that misinformation (when false information is spread regardless of intent to mislead) and disinformation (information that is deliberately misleading, like propaganda) can cause social conflict. Instead of this always being a negative consequence, it may in fact serve to spur social systems to grow or change and “serve society as an immune mechanism,” the authors posit.
