Women Bishops and Rhetorics of Shalom: A Whole Peace argues that the theological concept of shalom offers a way forward for progressive Christians who want to advocate for social justice based on their faith in an increasingly globalizing world characterized by many faiths. To do so, the book considers the rhetorical leadership of three women bishops who are all "firsts" in important ways: Marjorie Matthews, the first woman bishop in any mainline Post-Reformation church, Leontine Kelly, the first woman bishop of color in any mainline church, and Katharine Jefferts Schori, the first woman to lead a national church in the Anglican Communion. This book is recommended for scholars interested in communications, religious studies, and gender studies.

This new book for scholars and university administrators offers a provocative critique of sexual justice Language and policy in higher education around the concept of consent. Complicating the idea that consent is plain common sense, Campuses of Consent shows how normative and inaccurate concepts about gender, gender identity, and sexuality erase queer or trans students' experiences and perpetuate narrow, regressive gender norms and individualist frameworks for understanding violence.Theresa A. Kulbaga and Leland G. Spencer prove that consent in higher education cannot be meaningfully separated from larger issues of institutional and structural power and oppression. While sexual assault advocacy campaigns, such as It's On Us, federal legislation from Title IX to the Clery Act, and more recent affirmative-consent Measures tend to construct consent in individualist terms, as something "given" or "received" by individuals, the authors imagine consent as something that can be constructed systemically and institutionally: in classrooms, campus communication, and shared campus spaces.

News media and popular culture in the United States have produced a conventional narrative of the outcomes of sexual abuse: someone perpetrates sexual violence, goes to trial, and is then punished with prison time. Survivors recede into the background, becoming minor characters in their own stories as intrepid prosecutors, police officers, and investigators gather evidence and build a case. Leland G. Spencer explains how the stories we tell about sexual assault serve to reinforce rape culture, privileging criminal punishment over social justice and community-based responses to sexual violence. Examining a broad range of popular media, including news coverage of the Brock Turner case, Naomi Iizuka’s popular play Good Kids, the television program Criminal Minds, and the book turned television show 13 Reasons Why, Spencer demonstrates how these representations shore up the carceral state, perpetuate rape myths, blame victims, and excuse those who harm. While increased discussion about sexual violence represents feminist progress, these narratives assume that policing and prosecution are the only means of achieving justice, sidelining other potential avenues for confronting perpetrators and supporting victims.

Transgender Communication Studies: Histories, Trends, and Trajectories brings scholarship in transgender studies to the forefront of the communication discipline. Leland Spencer and Jamie Capuzza provide a broad foundation that documents the evolution of transgender communication studies and challenges fundamental assumptions about the relationship between communication and identity. The contributors explore the political conditions these practices create for persons across the spectrum of gender identities and sexual orientations, placing them in the subdisciplines of human communication, media, and public and rhetorical communication. The collection also looks to the future of transgender research with suggestions and directives for continued work. This comprehensive study inspires critical thinking about gender identity and transgender lives from within the vocabularies and methodologies of communication studies.