abstract: ABSTRACT This study sought to inform the curriculum of crew resource management (CRM) for multi-pilot flight deck operations. The CRM curriculum requires continued reexamination to ensure safe flight in the changing demographic of flight decks in the US. The study calls attention to the CRM curriculum’s insufficient inclusion of robust training components to address intercultural communication skills and conflict management strategies. Utilizing a phenomenological approach, the study examined the communicative experiences of African American female military and airline transport pilots on the flight deck and within the aviation industry. Co-cultural theory was used as a theoretical framework to investigate these co-researcher’s (pilots) experiences. A parallel goal of the investigation was to better understand raced and gendered communication as they occur in this specific context—the flight deck of US airlines and military aircraft. The researcher conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews and shadowed two co-researchers (pilots) for a period of days and built a relationship with them over the course of one year. Eight years of preparation working in the airline industry situated the researcher for this study. The researcher collected stories and interviews during this time immersed in industry. The data collected offers initial insights into the experiences of non-dominant group members in this unique organizational environment. The study’s findings are reported in the form of a creative/narrative nonfiction essay. This effort was twofold: (1) the narrative served to generate a record of experiences for continued examination and future research and (2) created useful data and information sets accessible to expert and non-expert audiences alike. The data supports rationalization as a co-cultural communication strategy, a recent expansion of the theory. Data also suggests that another strategy—strategic alliance building—may be useful in expanding the scope of co-cultural theory. The proposed assertive assimilation orientation identifies the intentional construct of alliances and warrants further investigation. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Communication 2015

My purpose in writing this collection of lyric essays is to examine my evolution during one decade, from age 19 to 29. Essential questions have guided me: What stimulated change? What formed my decisions? What predisposed me to my relationship with my partner? Why did I want to have a child? What kind of relationship do I have with my son? How did my relationship with my partner evolve? Why did we decide to leave Miami? Hopefully, I have given the reader a glimpse into my movement from self-centeredness to motherhood, from aloof adolescent to committed partner, from timid daughter to self-aware individual. The nature of my inquiry led me to confessional conclusions that clarified my reactive behavior or lack of initiative, which my initial memories of the same events often disguised. These confessions are sometimes as satisfying as the more celebratory moments themselves, because they challenge older notions of self and invite the possibility of change. Specific authors who have provided models of substance and style include, but are not limited to Annie Dillard, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sharon Olds, Michael Ondaatje, and Richard Rodriguez. I use lyrical techniques to translate my experiences into crafted prose. I incorporate recurring lines to create links between essays that stand alone, thereby forming a sequence. Some experiences are so personal and specific to me that using an adopted form, such as a repurposed fairy tale, a cento, and the inverted pyramid, has allowed me to create a measure of distance from the subject, which I found necessary for rendering it clearly. I allude to specific songs to help me establish exposition and lend tone and texture to my scenes. I chose to use the second person and direct my words to a specific audience, such as my mother, my partner, or my son, because at times it feels more authentic to let the reader listen to the way I speak to that person than to tell about the relationship. I also chose to capture the voices of certain people speaking directly to me in order to establish the most authentic speaker. My effort to answer essential questions sometimes conjured scenes from the distant past. I use line breaks to let the reader fill in the gaps or make the leap to explore connections across time. Juxtaposition and prolepsis link these tableaus so the reader can see my life and uncover the answers along with me.

No description available.

Rein of Renegades is an introduction to the young adult contemporary fantasy novel of the same name. It is prefaced with an explication of various drafts written throughout adolescence. I am trying to reclaim things I've misplaced or dropped. Over the past few years, I've had much too many trinkets to carry. There went the melodramatic allegations from my teenage writing voice, cracked on a classroom floor. There went the ability to sit, stomach deep, so steadily grounded in another world, this escape blurred with the strawberry ice cream I dripped onto the campus concrete. Writing the ideal love becomes complicated, jaded, too realistic when the hands writing it are always reaching for someone who never reaches back at the right time

No description available.

Home Planet is a collection of travel essays about climate change. Like most works in the personal essay tradition, these essays reveal the mind as it works its way through a problem or question, all while inviting writer and readers to foster empathy as a mode of being. Also, like most works in the travel essay subgenre, these essays blend narrative, setting, and thought, suggesting important parallels between interior reflection and exterior displacement. Finally, since the essays in this collection take on climate change as their theme, they attempt to make meaning of climate-related subjects like extreme heat, mass extinction, and ice patch archaeology. Ultimately, the force that unites these essays is love. By describing, hinting at, and plainly stating love for people, landscapes, and more-than-human beings, the essays invite readers to consider their own relationship to the Earth, especially during a time of environmental crisis.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This is a creative thesis that focuses on the infertility experiences of the author. The introduction examines the author's justification for choosing personal essay as a genre and French feminism as the guiding theory in writing the essays. Six personal essays center on the author's attempts to have a child and the discoveries and failures along the way. Throughout literary history, women's bodies have traditionally been viewed from the outside looking in, as objects to be reified and preserved or exploited and used. Using the writing the body critics as a theoretical framework, the essays discuss the comforts and discomforts of being inside a female body looking out. Although personal, the essays attempt to connect to the larger world. In several of the essays associations are made between the experiences of the author and the experiences of other women. Several essays also reveal the differing perspectives between her and her husband as they experience infertility.