Designed as an alternative stand-alone text or supplement to conventional research methods texts, Communication Impact introduces methods through engaging narrative descriptions of actual research projects driven by contemporary real-world questions. The featured case studies demonstrate three important points: 1) Doing communication research is an active, creative process; 2) Actual research projects are very different and much more exciting than typical textbook cases; and 3) Communication research generates knowledge that can make a difference to the world. Each chapter addresses a different method, including community-based research, research on organizations and institutions, problem-focused research, cross-cultural research, and research on new technologies.

Gender Variances and Sexual Diversity in the Caribbean: Perspectives, Histories, Experiences is a collection of critical perspectives on fundamental questions of how sexual orientation and gender in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean are conceived, studied, discoursed and experienced. Bringing together and updating existing and in-progress scholarly work on minority genders and sexualities in the region, this collection seeks to provide a fresh set of lenses through which to examine the issues affecting people in the Caribbean who fall outside the traditional binary categories of heterosexual males or heterosexual females.Opening with a variety of perspectives - from the biological to the religious and historiographical - the volume explores definitions of sex and gender as well as constructions of sexuality among Commonwealth Caribbean scholars, and the ways in which the Judaeo-Christian tradition popular in the region has responded to these. Other chapters examine the socializing forces that reinforce or challenge conventional conceptions of gender and sexuality, and how these result in the constraining forces of social exclusion and discrimination that many members of the LGBTQ community in the region experience. The book ends with chapters that interrogate the normative standards of gender and sexuality that have traditionally underlain Caribbean popular culture. Additionally, there is an exploration of how anti-gay discourse in Jamaican dancehall, embedded in a language linked to the country's vernacular nationalism, has been neutralized by a coalition of local and international LGBTQ activists.

This book offers chapters on the dialectics of gender and newsroom culture, bringing a feminist analysis to that relation. The text aims to bring coherence and insight to a still relatively under-researched topic. The contributors come from a diverse range of geographies, approaches and contexts. Together, the chapters provide a timely intervention i the debates around gender and journalism, extending the analysis to produce a genuinely East-West, North-South set of analyses on this important topic.