Communication Department

Hope’s Communication Majors excel at public speaking in the workplace–and twenty-first century jobs regularly involve public speaking. Hear from two of our recent graduates as they reflect on their learning from Comm 140 Public Presentations:

Jeff Serini (2011) is opening a new company, Paragon Fitness. He credits his Hope College education in public speaking  with guiding him through his pitches as he explained his company’s influence marketing strategies to a group of entrepreneurs in downtown Grand Rapids. He reminds speakers to smile, look people in the eye to build trust, and be comfortable with pauses instead of filling the silence with “umms” and other vocal fillers.

Anysie Ishimwe (2016) works in Rwanda through a Global Health Corps fellowship. Specifically, Ms. Ishimwe works at Gardens for Health International, helping health centers throughout Rwanda treat chronic malnutrition and teaching children and families to better understand nutrition. Ms. Ishimwe describes how her work requires her to make many presentations and moderate events with high ranking government officials. Recognizing the importance and everyday utility of good public speaking, Ms. Ishimwe is passing it forward and training her new colleagues in public speaking.

Ultimately, speakers need to engage their audience members with their content and delivery. Comm 140 Public Presentations teaches students how to (1) draw on strong evidence to make a persuasive argument, (2) how to organize the content so it is easy to understand, (3) how to focus on the audience so the material makes sense to them, and (4) how to stylize and deliver a speech for the most effective communication.

Dr. Sarah Kornfield joined the the Hope Academy of Senior Professionals (HASP) to present “Contemporary Feminism,” discussing how feminism is currently working to “end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.”

Dr. Kornfield teaches in Hope College’s Communication Department and the Women’s & Gender Studies Program. Her work consistently demonstrates how communication practices affect gender and vice versa. We live in language (and symbols more broadly); therefore, equality and inequality are communicated.

Communication faculty are committed to life-long learning and community engagement. We teach, lead, and learn in local, national, and global communities. Dr. James Herrick has been hard at work helping us think about how the stories we tell ourselves results in technological advances–like space exploration.

This semester, Dr. Herrick led the conversation at Grand Valley State University’s Roger That! Conference, tracing the “the modern mythology of space from the late nineteenth-century Russian Cosmists, through twentieth-century science fiction writers, to the Transhumanists of our own day.” In this presentation, Dr. Herrick explained how these “narratives of space shape space policy, inform public discourse, and profoundly influence our expectations of the human future.”

The Hope College Communication Department is on a mission to equip students to understand how humans create and share meaning in a global society. We prepare students to create, critique, and interpret communication messages and practices in multiple contexts–in relationships, in organizations, in public, across cultures, and through media.

We strive toward this mission through our classroom teaching, mentoring in office hours, public lectures and campus events, and our internship program. We’re thrilled to see local organizations, corporations, and industries recognize Communication students’ knowledge and abilities!

When a TV actor becomes pregnant, viewers often consider how the pregnancy will affect the series’ narrative: Will the pregnancy be written into the series? If so, who is the father? How will having a baby change the character?

But what about the style–the way the character looks on the screen? Dr. Kornfield’s  research focuses on how television–as an medium–stylizes onscreen pregnancies: how they costume the actors, position the actors in the stage, and how the camerawork and editing portrays the actors.

Dr. Kornfield’s article “Televisual Pregnancy Beauty” helps us understand the ways in which the entertainment industry commodifies pregnancy and reinforces the idea that women (especially on TV) ought to be beautiful all the time–even while pregnant.

The Communication Department congratulates Dr. Jim Herrick on the publication of his new book, Visions of Technological Transcendence: Human Enhancement and the Rhetoric of the Future.

Dr. Herrick’s research on transhumanism studies the discourse of human enhancement–how people talk about immortality, the merger of humans and machines, human-level artificial intelligence, and space colonization. Dr. Herrick identifies how the rhetoric of human enhancement functions as a system of mythic narratives. These myths don’t just describe current technology; instead society uses these myths to guide the types of technologies we produce. This means that by studying each myth, we can predict technology’s trajectory.

Hope’s Communication Department is delighted for Dr. Jim Herrick and his exciting research!