About Jasmine T. Austin, Ph.D.: Dr. Jasmine T. Austin is an Assistant Professor at Texas State University, where she researches socialization processes in the context of organizational communication, interpersonal communication, and media, with a focus on their relationship with racism and marginalization. Through case study analyses, intersectional methodologies, and award-winning theoretical contributions, she has advanced national and international conversations on racial justice, representation, and communicative inclusion. She is the author of the book Communication Theory: Racially Diverse and Inclusive Perspectives, with Drs. Mark Orbe and Jeanetta D. Sims. Her second book, Communication and Organizational Changemaking for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: A Case Studies Approach, with Drs. Bobbi Van Gilder and Jacqueline S. Bruscella, received the Distinguished Edited Book Award from the Applied Communication Division of the National Communication Association (NCA). Her additional publications appear in journals including Media, Culture, & Society; Management Communication Quarterly; Communication Teacher; and Health Communication.
Dr. Austin has been honored with a number of other accolades from NCA, including the Presidential Citation Award, and the Marsha Houston Award, which recognizes women who are junior or mid-career scholars and whose research, service, advocacy, and activism exemplify critical engagement with social justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion. She is also the recipient of the Awujo Oluranlowo Award for scholars committed to community engagement. Dr. Austin has served as Chair of the NCA’s Activism and Social Justice Division, coordinator of NCA’s New Orleans Outreach Program, and Secretary of the NCA’s African American Communication and Culture Division (AACC). In 2018, she was Coordinator of Volunteers for the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE), and in 2020, she was lead organizer for the AACC #ScholarStrike Conference.
At Texas State University, Dr. Austin helped found the Faculty Research and Productivity (FRAP) Network, which supports interdisciplinary collaborations among faculty of color, and in 2024, she received the University’s Presidential Distinction Award for Excellence in Teaching. As a graduate student, Dr. Austin received multiple teaching awards, as well as the Wilena Stanford Commitment to Diversity Award and a Woman of Distinction Award from the University of Wyoming. Dr. Austin received her Ph.D. in Organizational and Race Communication with a certification in Women and Gender Studies from The University of Oklahoma (OU). She earned her M.A. from the University of Wyoming and her B.A. from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, both in Communication Studies.
Interview Questions
[MastersinCommunications.com] May we begin with an overview of your academic and professional background? How did you become interested in organizational communication, and begin to explore race and marginalization in the contexts of organizations and beyond — for example, in media and higher education?
[Dr. Jasmine T. Austin] I am from Louisiana, and I am the youngest of three. I have older twin brothers who are counselors. We all went to the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Texas. I played volleyball for my first four years and soccer my fifth year. Then, I went to the University of Wyoming for my M.A. The transition to Wyoming from Louisiana and Texas was a terrible idea [laughs]. After that, I went to The University of Oklahoma for my Ph.D.
My interest in organizational communication came from my own experiences with organizations. When I interviewed for the University of Wyoming, I went there during the summer. The summer in Wyoming is beautiful. The trees are lush, and there are mountains in the distance no matter which direction you face. I did not know where Wyoming was on the map, at all. When I got there, I had a cardigan on, and my adviser asked, “Do you have a jacket?” I said, “Of course, I’m wearing one,” and he said, “Okay, [chuckles] you’ll be fine.” My brothers and I all went to Wyoming, and that first semester was the first time we ever saw snow in our lives. None of us had a jacket or knew how to drive in the snow, and we were just lost. That was my first experience with someone who could have helped prepare me in an organizational context, but chose not to. They thought it was funny for me to only have a cardigan, and it had real repercussions.
When I went to The University of Oklahoma for my Ph.D., I had learned from my mistakes. I spoke to two professors in different departments about what to expect. I asked the first professor, who was a white man, “What will my experience be like here?” and he said, “Oh, it will be great. You’re going to love it here. These are the classes you should take, and I’m happy to be your mentor,” and so on. Then I went to the African American Studies Department. I asked the Chair, who was a Black woman, that same question, and she said, “Oh, put your head on my shoulder. I’ll be here for you if you need anything.” She told me about SAE [Sigma Alpha Epsilon], the fraternity who had been documented, nationally, for doing a racist chant at OU just before I arrived.
I was really struck by how different those socialization experiences were. I thought, “Just tell me the truth. Help me. Prepare me for what I’m going to go through.” That led me into organizational communication, and specifically the study of organizational socialization. It is connected to this experience of me moving from one state to the next and trying to figure out life.
[MastersinCommunications.com] One important focus of your organizational communication research has been on how employers and employees communicate about racial difference during “organizational socialization,” as in your recent publication “The Influence of Colorblind and Race-Acknowledged Organizational Socialization Messages During Offer Consideration.” For those of our readers who may be less familiar with the term, could you describe what “organizational socialization” is and highlight some of the key findings of your research on the significance of communication about race during this process?
[Dr. Jasmine T. Austin] Socialization, put simply, is introducing somebody to something new and ensuring they are aware of what comes with that experience. In the context of organizations, this means how we are preparing the people we bring in for their future career. In the context of race and family, this is how we are preparing our children to understand their racial identities. Those are all the things I am interested in: how can we prepare people to have transparent conversations about real life experiences?
The article you mentioned builds on my dissertation work with Dr. Ryan Bisel. We studied organizational socialization at the very early stages. Our work was focused on Fredric Jablin’s model of organizational assimilation, which has multiple stages, starting with anticipatory socialization, then moving to encounter, metamorphosis, and exit. We were focused on anticipatory socialization, which occurs before you even enter the organization. This connects to the conversations and experiences I had at the University of Wyoming and OU. How are you preparing people for their organizational experiences?
In this publication, we discuss two kinds of anticipatory socialization. There are RJPs, which are Realistic Job Previews. Examples of RJPs are when people explain, “These are the responsibilities of your job” or “These are the classes you take.” Then there are Realistic Organizational Previews (ROPs), which describe the organizational culture, events, and initiatives, both good and bad. We had 338 Black participants in our study. We asked, if they were to get socialization messages that had nothing to do with race (a colorblind message), a socialization message that had everything to do with race (an explicit message), or a socialization message vaguely about their “personal identity” (an implicit message), what impact this message would have. Specifically, we measured how it affected organizational attractiveness: that is, participants’ motivation to join the organization, their intention to accept the offer, and their perception of the person within the organization who socialized them.
What we found was that our participants did not care who said it — Black or white — or how they said it — explicit or implicit — they just wanted to hear messages about the organizational culture and their race. It was an overwhelming chorus of Black participants saying, “Just tell us.” I have a new publication with Jeremy Bohonos, “Workplace Socialization: Reproducing Racism? Or Challenging Discriminatory Standards?,” based on qualitative data I collected from these participants. One of them told me, “I actually want a white socializer. They’re the ones in the rooms with other white people and will know who is racist and who isn’t, whereas a Black socializer wouldn’t even have that information.”
Taken together, we see Black members of organizations wanting those organizations to talk to them about their experiences and acknowledge their racially marginalized identities. They want conversations that say, “I see you,” and open the door for future dialogue. It makes them feel that, if something were to happen in the future, they had someone to talk to about it. As a personal example, I was in Wyoming when Michael Brown was shot. There was a protest outside the door of our communication department, and I saw zero faculty from the department at this protest. No one asked how I felt, or how I was doing, and I had no one to reach out to because no one had ever acknowledged my racial identity.
Most organizations still practice colorblind communication practices or they put the responsibility on people of color to have that conversation. People feel like they cannot talk about race sometimes because of EEOC [U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] regulations, but, as we discuss in the article, the EEOC says you can talk about it after the offer is given. The reluctance to have these conversations stems from fear, which is unfortunate, because if you are operating from this place of fear, you are not having a genuine or full relationship with someone.
[MastersinCommunications.com] You have investigated public memory in other recent publications, including “Narrating the Past on Fairer Terms: Approaches to Building Multicultural Public Memory,” and “Generating More Inclusive Media Memory: The Limits and Possibilities of News Archives.” Would you discuss what drew your attention to the cultural exclusions of dominant practices of public memory and describe the “inclusive” and “multicultural” memory you advocate for in these works?
[Dr. Jasmine T. Austin] My focus is on race, marginalization, and socialization, whether that is socialization in organizations, media, or the family. These two articles are about how we are socializing people into their own history. The first responds to the 25th anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles riots following Rodney King’s beating by police. It asks, “How are we telling the stories of our past so we can socialize people into a better understanding of who we are in the future?” The iconic documentation of those events was made by white directors who had a bird’s eye view of everything, but never interviewed the affected people in the community.
We analyzed the documentaries that did engage with the community, and noticed that there was such a difference in how they narrated our history. We analyzed these documentaries side-by-side, focusing on one 10-minute block of time that represents the same events. In the first, white people were talking for about 9 of the 10 minutes. In the multicultural one, we had Black people talking for 8 of the 10. This really humanized the community. From the bird’s eye view, you see images of Black people shattering windows, but you do not see them helping each other off of curbs, or sending groceries to one another to help those in need.
The second documentary gives you a holistic and nuanced portrait of what happened, while the first just gives you a much more superficial account. It demonstrates how we need to be mindful of who is telling our stories, and ask why we are not in the room while these stories are being developed and told. We need to collect more diverse data. It is easy to find news footage. We need to be connecting with those communities portrayed in these archives, interviewing them if they are still alive, and finding other ways to access these histories outside of official accounts. If we told the whole story, people would look at each other differently. Things would shift.
[MastersinCommunications.com] One of your most recent publications is the textbook Communication Theory: Racially Diverse and Inclusive Perspectives, which aims to decenter the field’s historical focus on whiteness and other normative identities (such as those pertaining to gender, sexuality, and ability) and take cultural difference as its starting point. Would you discuss how this book re-narrates communication studies and communication theory through the lens of cultural difference, with particular attention to identities marginalized within and outside of the discipline?
[Dr. Jasmine T. Austin] This is the book I needed as a graduate student. As a Black woman in a graduate program, I never saw myself or people like me in the classroom. I had to find the one Black professor in my department, and I asked him to create a directed reading for me. I said, “I just want to read about people like me.”
He introduced me to Drs. Marnel Niles Goins, Brenda J. Allen, Patricia S. Parker, and all of these awesome Black women who came before me. That was the first time I ever read about myself. For me, I think this book re-narrates and reorients communication studies to let marginalized students see themselves in the discipline.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Did writing a textbook that focalizes race, identity, and difference come with certain challenges, with respect, for example, to making these issues accessible to student readers?
[Dr. Jasmine T. Austin] This book is so different from other textbooks, not just because our authors and theorists are people of color. We also include short reflections, which are stories from graduate students, professors, theorists and researchers about their experiences and work. This really brings students into the book and into the field. We did one, for example, with Dr. Mark Orbe. He discusses being in graduate school and how his professor discouraged him from reading muted group theory, which became the foundation of his own co-cultural theory. Reading that narrative and then reading that theory helps students see themselves, and also humanizes Dr. Orbe as a scholar.
The challenges came with finding the authors. At the end of the book, we discuss public sphere theory, an addition to the book once it was already under review. This is because we did not even realize Dr. Catherine Squires’ invaluable contributions to this theory. We were lucky to be able to revise the manuscript to include her work. It was very challenging to try to make sure we were including all of the voices that need to be included, at least in this first edition.
It was also a challenge for me to publish this work because we were shopping the proposal for publication during my first semester as a tenure track faculty member. I am so grateful to Drs. Mark Orbe and Jeanetta Sims for advocating for me, because the book was my idea, but nobody knew who I was. That is a challenge that comes with being new to the game. You need support in figuring out how to open doors. For them to advocate on my behalf to the publishers for my first authorship was amazing. They made sure I was in the front and leading the charge.
[MastersinCommunications.com] As a scholar, you are committed to socially and politically engaged work. For example, you served as lead organizer of the African American Communication & Culture (AACC) #ScholarStrike Conference, which held its inaugural meeting in 2020. Would you provide us with some background on the #ScholarStrike Conference and your work organizing it?
[Dr. Jasmine T. Austin] I was in my first week of my tenure track position when I received an email on the shared listserv of NCA’s African American Communication and Culture Division and the Black Caucus. The email was calling for activism and used the hashtag #ScholarStrike. I replied, “Yes, we need to do something!” Then, suddenly, everyone was responding to my email saying, “Thank you, Jasmine, for organizing!”
Dr. Mark Orbe, whom I had not heard of before, sent me an email on the side and said, “I saw what happened, I got you, let’s meet.” We had a Zoom call with Dr. Jeanetta Sims. Because of their support, I felt comfortable doing “something.” I ended up being lead organizer of the conference, with support from them and Dr. Ron Jackson [Ronald Jackson II]. We organized that conference in eight days and had a great turnout. It was not my grand idea to do it. I just got caught up in that email chain, but I tried to follow my mom’s advice and “let it shine”.
The idea behind #ScholarStrike was that we needed to take a step back from academia and hold space to interrogate the fact that we, as Black people, are not well-represented in higher education. We decided we would strike for a day and that, if we were going to do that, we should create a space to organize and have these important conversations. We assembled six panels: one discussed how we should teach about the #BlackLivesMatter movement in our classrooms, one focused on antiracist scholarship, one discussed engaging students as activists and featured talks from student activists, one discussed how we teach intersectionality and difference, one was on institutional and administrative responses to racism, and the final was a question and answer session with some participants.
The idea was to create a platform to discuss racial issues in communication. We will see what comes next, but we have tentative plans to have another #ScholarStrike conference in the near future.
[MastersinCommunications.com] At Texas State University, you worked with the Translational Health Research Center to develop the Faculty Research and Productivity (FRAP) Network. Would you introduce us to this initiative and its main goals?
[Dr. Jasmine T. Austin] This initiative is about connecting people of color and faculty who study marginalized groups at Texas State. We all come together to collaborate and share resources. We have done virtual writing retreats, grant writing courses, and had a few guest speakers come in. Since the acronym is FRAP, like the coffee, we gave members gift cards to a local coffee shop.
Excitingly, we have had two grants and three or four publications stemming from the FRAP Network collaborations so far. These collaborations are extremely interdisciplinary, too. I have a publication coming out with someone who studies race in higher education. We have had people from public health and from animal sciences. We started with a focus on interdisciplinary health research, but expanded our goals beyond this to support the research of people from marginalized backgrounds across the University.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Do you have advice you would give to students interested in studying race and cultural difference in the contexts of organizational communication, media studies, or other areas, who are currently considering pursuing a graduate degree in communication studies?
[Dr. Jasmine T. Austin] My main piece of advice is to find your people—mentors and community. My mentors came mostly from outside of my department, and I built those relationships by literally just sending out emails. Dr. Marnel Niles Goins, who is the NCA’s first Black woman President, is my mentor. In grad school, I read one of her articles. It was one of the first I read that was about Black women, written by a Black woman. I felt like she held a mirror up to me. I emailed her to thank her for writing about us. She replied and suggested we meet, and we have been friends ever since. I sent a similar email to Dr. Brenda J. Allen, who became one of my mentors as well.
My advice is, in addition to the mentors that you have in front of you, find people that you genuinely connect with who can walk alongside you on the path with you that leads you where you want to go. Send the email. Make the connections. Meet people, and not just because you need something. If you appreciate people, that will lead to genuine mentorships and friendships. I am forever grateful for my graduate school friends; for my accountability partner, Dr. Britney Gilmore; for my students and colleagues; and, most of all, my husband.
Finally, as my mom has encouraged me to do for as long as I can remember, “Let it shine!” Whatever “it” is for you.”
Thank you, Dr. Jasmine T. Austin, for sharing your insight on race, socialization, and marginalization in organizational communication and beyond!
Please note: Our interview series aims to represent the diverse research being pursued by scholars in the field of communication, which is often socially and politically engaged. As a result, all readers may not agree with the views and opinions expressed in this interview, which are independent of the views of MastersinCommunications.com, its parent company, partners, and affiliates.
