About Leandra Hinojosa Hernández, Ph.D.: Leandra Hinojosa Hernández is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication at The University of Utah, where her research explores the interconnections between journalism and mass communication, health communication, media ethics, and Latino/a/x communication studies. Dr. Hernández’s work employs Chicana feminist methodologies and pedagogies to explore reproductive justice and gender violence as critical health communication issues, as well as the ways in which media organizations and journalists cover such topics.
Her scholarship also attends to the social impact of activism for reproductive rights. Her first book, Challenging Reproductive Control and Gendered Violence in the Américas: Intersectionality, Power, and Struggles for Rights, received the 2018 Bonnie Ritter Book Award from the Feminist and Gender Studies Division of the National Communication Association (NCA). Dr. Hernández has co-edited several scholarly collections, including This Bridge We Call Communication: Anzaldúan Approaches to Theory, Method, and Praxis (2019), which won the 2020 Outstanding Book Award from the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender (OSCLG) and the 2021 NCA Latina/o Communication Studies Outstanding Edited Collection Award. She is also co-editor of Latina/o/x Communication Studies: Theories, Methods, and Praxis.
Another important line of Dr. Hernández’s work applies communication perspectives to study education for military service members and their families. She is co-editor of Supporting the Military-Affiliated Learner: Communication Approaches to Military Pedagogy and Education, and Military Spouses with Graduate Degrees: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Thriving Amidst Uncertainty, which received the Military Writers Society of America Bronze Medal Book Award.
Dr. Hernández’s career is distinguished by a commitment to service. Currently, she is Vice Chair of the NCA’s Activism and Social Justice Division, having also served as Chair of NCA’s Health Communication Division and Feminist and Gender Studies Division. Further, she is a co-founder of the NCA La Raza Caucus Mentorship Initiative. Her service also includes her work as co-editor of Bloomsbury’s Studies in Health Communication Series and Peter Lang’s Cultural Media Studies Series.
Dr. Hernández’s scholarship, service, and pedagogy have earned her a variety of accolades. Her article, “Telling Global Health Stories: Narrative Message Design for Issues Management,” co-authored with Joshua B. Barbour and Marissa J. Doshi, earned the Bill Eadie Distinguished Scholarly Article Award from the Applied Communication Division of the NCA. In 2020, she received the Faculty Champion of Inclusion Award from Utah Valley University, as well as teaching and pedagogy awards from the Activism and Social Justice Division and Communication Ethics Division of the NCA. Dr. Hernández was also honored with the Emerging Professional Award from the Utah Women’s Higher Education Network (UWHEN) in 2023 and the 2024 NCA Women’s Caucus Francine Merritt award in recognition of outstanding contributions to the lives of women in communication.
Prior to becoming a professor, Dr. Hernández worked professionally as a news assignments editor. She received her Ph.D. from Texas A&M University and her M.A. from the University of Houston, both in Communication. She earned her B.A. in Communication from the University of St. Thomas in Houston, TX.
Interview Questions
[MastersinCommunications.com] May we begin with an overview of your academic and professional background? How did you become interested in health communication, media studies, and journalism studies, and come to focus your research on issues related to reproductive justice, political activism, and the health experiences of Latina/o/x communities?
[Dr. Leandra Hernández] I received my Bachelor of Arts in Communication from the University of St. Thomas, which is a small Catholic liberal arts school in my hometown, Houston, Texas. When I was a kid, I always told people that I either wanted to be a teacher (because both of my parents were teachers in their earlier years), a journalist, or a news anchor. I grew up watching the news in both English and Spanish with my parents and my grandparents, and imagined myself doing that. Still, it took me a little while to get there. As an undergraduate, I majored in several things I hated before I finally landed in communication.
As I took broadcast journalism and studio film production classes and did my first internship at a local news station, I discovered I was very passionate about the field. I graduated with my bachelor’s at the height of the 2008 recession. I had secured a position working as an assignment editor for a local news station, but knew I did not want to be an assignment editor. I wanted to be doing production, video editing, or news. But, unless the stars align perfectly, if you want to be an anchor you generally start out in a smaller market, and then you work your way up. I was also beginning to miss school, so I thought, “Maybe I’ll give a master’s degree a shot,” very naively thinking that it would just be an extension of an undergraduate program. I was very wrong. [laughs].
I was still working at a news station while also doing my master’s degree in mass communication at the University of Houston and becoming more engaged with health communication. My master’s advisor, Dr. Jill Yamasaki, said, “I know you are interested in mass media first, with a little bit of interest in health. Here are some paradigms and theories I think you should check out for your thesis.” I was also working as a teaching assistant, and I just loved teaching. At first, it was hard to decide whether I wanted to be a full-time news professional for the rest of my life or whether I wanted to be an academic, but ultimately, I dove headfirst into the academic route.
I received my Ph.D. from Texas A&M University, where I focused more on health communication and a bit less on mass communication. Now, several years later, I feel like I am finally at a place where both of those fields are making more sense together as resources for thinking about gender violence and reproductive injustice as legitimate public health concerns. I am also deeply interested in the role of mass media in representing and talking about these topics, whether we are thinking about journalists, podcasters, or popular culture.
Feminists always say the personal is political. I have never understood my life as separate from my activism or my work. I think that is partially because my parents were activists when they were much younger. My dad founded an education-focused nonprofit for Mexican American and Latino/a/x communities in Houston (AAMA). Growing up in that space, embodiment, lived experience, and research all worked together. That is why critical paradigms just made sense to me.
Further, as a survivor of gender violence, including harassment and stalking, and having grown up in Texas in a very traditional, Catholic, Mexican American home and community, conversations about violence, reproductive rights, and their relationship to our culture were always on my mind, even if I did not have the words when I was younger to think about them in that way.
I find a lot of value in mentorship and community building and also comadrisma, which is something that my dear friend Sarah De Los Santos Upton and I have talked about quite a bit in some of our work [including “Comadrisma, Mamás, and Tías: An Intersectional Chicana Feminist Approach to Comunidad and Reproductive Justice,” which describes comadrisma with respect to networks of personal, professional, and social support among women. These networks provide familial care that is not bound to biological family structures and can also foster activism and resistance]. All of this has come together in my communication scholarship and my activism.
Our field has traditionally been siloed, where the quantitative mass communication folks were doing one kind of work and critical media folks were doing another kind. In recent decades, many folks have been working to bring these approaches together in critical media spaces and critical health communication spaces. A large part of my work, as I mentioned earlier, has been to position gender violence and reproductive justice as topics that are not just feminist topics or critical media studies topics, but also critical health communication topics.
When I was in graduate school, my dissertation focused on how Latinas make sense of genetic testing, as mediated by their cultural beliefs and their media consumption, particularly because of the larger cultural assumptions that all Latinas are Catholic and all Latinas are pro-life. This research was partly driven by tensions that I felt when I was younger, because Latinas often receive messages that you are only as good insofar as you are a mother, and you have a responsibility to give back to your family and community by having children. It is a dominant value or idea that many of us receive when we are younger.
I am childfree by choice. I always had a sense, especially as a queer person, that maybe having kids was not going to be my main priority. Even as I am nearing 40, these are still conversations that come up with my family members and others. Still, as the recent election result illustrated, Latina, Latino, and Latinx identity is not a monolith. There are all sorts of cultural nuances intrinsic to the community.
My relationship to this work, then, is part research, part activism, part identity. At the core, reproductive justice is something that needs to be talked about more. We should be thinking about how politicians and the media represent this issue, and advocating for media frames and stories that highlight reproductive justice, so that it gets as much news time as pro-life, pro-choice debates do. This is personal, political, and ongoing work.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Your scholarship focuses on critiquing dominant media frames used to represent reproductive justice and gender violence, while exploring activism in Latin America and the United States that responds to these issues. Could you explore this dual focus of your work, for example, in your book Challenging Reproductive Control and Gendered Violence in the Américas: Intersectionality, Power, and Struggles for Rights, which won the Bonnie Ritter Book Award from the NCA’s Feminist and Gender Studies Division?
[Dr. Leandra Hernández] That was my first book, and it came out in 2018. I co-authored it with Sarah De Los Santos Upton, whom I mentioned earlier. She is one of my best friends and sister scholars. Together, we embarked upon that book project because of shared concerns we had in the midst of the 2016 election and because of our similar but different lived experiences. Sarah and I are both Chicana feminists from Texas, but I am from Houston, and she is from El Paso. We have very different relationships to our state and Tejana identity. Sarah is a mother, has three children, and she finds so much love and value in that. Like I mentioned earlier, I am childfree by choice, and I find so much value in being a godmother and mentor for those in my family and communities. But we share relationships with reproductive justice and community organizations and backgrounds in journalism as well.
We decided to explore different case studies to make sense of what we were seeing at this point in time, with respect to both media coverage of reproductive health and gender violence, as well as activism. In our book, we develop the concept of reproductive feminicides or reproductive feminicidios. Feminicide, or feminicidio in Spanish, quite literally means the murder of women and the subjection of women to violence because they are women. Feminicidio is rooted in patriarchy and misogyny, and in Latin American cultures machismo plays an important role.
While doing research for the book, we noticed that Mexican feminists and Latin American feminists have developed sophisticated typologies of feminicide or violence against women, but there was not anything in the literature to make sense of reproductive violence against women specifically. Reproductive violence can take the form of restrictions to necessary healthcare: state policies after the overturning of Roe vs. Wade have led to the deaths of women from reproductive complications because they could not get access to an abortion. It can take the form of involuntary sterilization, or, at the more extreme end of the spectrum, the murdering of pregnant women.
We analyzed different media discourses in the US and Latin America that were talking about reproductive rights at the time. We critiqued one set of discourses that overwhelmingly focused on pro-life and pro-choice activism at the expense of discussions of reproductive justice. In that chapter, we make the case that reproductive justice frameworks could be a solution to some of these problems, but they very rarely get the airtime that they deserve, especially in traditional media discourses that are so obsessed with pro-life, pro-choice, pro-life, pro-choice.
We also analyzed a few other contexts in the book, one of which looked at the news framing of the Zika virus and how that impacted Latin American women. It is interesting to think about it now, because COVID-19 has understandably dominated our thoughts in the public health context. Everyone forgets about the Zika virus: how it appeared, caused real damage, then faded away from the media’s agenda-setting perspective. We were thinking about how gender framing or feminist news framing played a role there. In this context, we analyzed Latin American news and public health discourses about the Zika virus and found that prevention messages were inherently gendered. Public health and news prevention messages also set up quite a conundrum for women, as the prevention directives released were not mindful of how challenging it would be for women to actually carry them out.
The conclusion considers the role of witnessing across these contexts. What are the ethical or moral obligations that journalists have when talking about these topics and that consumers have when reading about these topics, which extend beyond reading an article or listening to a podcast and then going back to your life and calling it a day? The idea of witnessing is also the basis for the book project that we are currently working on, which is analyzing these discourses within the context of the first Trump presidency, specifically thinking about the overturning of Roe v. Wade and how that has impacted media discourses about reproductive justice and the harms that individuals are facing.
There, we are also thinking about the role of transnational news coverage. I do not want to give too many spoilers, but one of the chapters focuses on the murder of pregnant women, not just in Latin American spaces, but also in the United States. There are very weird trajectories of headlines and news frames that we are seeing transnationally, with some news headlines that cover stories about the murdering of pregnant women with language like, “womb raiders strike again.” Headlines such as this highlight how sensationalized news operates in different contexts, as well as its various potential impacts on readers.
At the end of the day, we keep asking ourselves, “What is the role of a journalist in raising awareness and performing ethical witnessing in a story covering a pregnant woman who has been murdered? Who is represented, who is being cited, and what journalistic frames are being used?” It has been heartening and rewarding to engage with the journalists who do this type of news coverage so well, as well as the activists who are working for change. It allows us to do more than emphasize the violence taking place; we can uplift exemplars that are really doing incredible work in praxis-based spaces.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Would you tell us a bit more about the critical terminologies you mentioned, feminicide and feminicidios? How do they contrast from the more common term femicide?
[Dr. Leandra Hernández] The term femicide was created by activist Diana Russell in the 1970s when she was speaking to tribunals that were discussing violence against women. She defined the term as the murder of women because they are women. There are good debates over the transition to feminicide and its Spanish counterpart, and the linguistic and the semantic differences between them. The term feminicide is usually meant to stress that this problem is systemic, not a simple result of individual misogyny.
Sarah and I utilize feminicide and feminicidio to honor the transnational context and the transnational relationship between the US and Latin American spaces when we are studying this topic. We also seek to honor the work that Mexican feminists and Latin American feminists have done to theorize the term outside of interpersonal violence — to consider structural factors and governmental factors, to consider the complex relationships between gender and biological sex, and more. When most scholars are working in this space, they are probably intentionally using the terms femicide, feminicide, or feminicidio with very particular meanings and commitments.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Would you tell us a little bit more about your research on activist movements that have resisted reproductive feminicide and restrictions on reproductive justice in the United States and Latin America? In particular, could you explore your work on health media activism, such as your recent piece, “Health Media Activism: Latin American Organizing in Response to Feminicides,” perhaps reflecting on how digital media technologies have shaped contemporary reproductive justice movements?
[Dr. Leandra Hernández] One of the groups that I have most frequently returned to is Ni Una Menos. It originated in Argentina, and means “Not One Woman Less,” which is an adaptation of poet and activist Susana Chávez’ phrase, “ni una muerta más” [not one more woman dead]. One of the pieces that always comes to mind for me here is a piece by W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg [“The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics”] that talks about collective action versus connective action. Through digital media spaces like Twitter and Instagram, and platform affordances like hashtags, individuals have been able to create connective action not only within countries, but also across countries and across continents.
Ni Una Menos, because of digital spaces and platform affordances, were able to create protests that were coordinated in Latin America but spread throughout the UK and the United States. Here we see activist efforts and movements are linking up in really important ways that may or may not have been possible before the age of social media.
This points to something so important about considering the role of activism. It is too easy for academic research to just say, “Oh, these poor victims. They have no agency, woe is them. Their life is terrible.” My work has long sought to uplift the role of the activists who are doing the work, because it shows us that, just as there are ecologies of violence or injustice, there are also legacies of activism and resistance, not just historically, but also contemporarily.
My scholarship, then, is not exclusively focused on the downfalls of social media. I also embrace its promises. It has quite literally brought people together, whether we are thinking about Ni Una Menos or the #MeToo movement, where survivors join to share their stories in digital spaces. For me, there is a lot of hope for activism when it comes to what social media has provided us.
Dr. Stevie Munz is one of my sibling scholars. We jokingly call ourselves co-conspirators because we met at a previous institution where we were two of the few, if not the only, critical scholars in the department. We decided to become productive agitators together. In one of our co-authored chapters, “Leaderless Rebellions: An Analysis of Digital Feminist Anti-Violence Activism,” Stevie and I talked about leaderless rebellions through the examples of Ni Una Menos and the Missing Murdered Indigenous Women’s movement, which organized on social media around the hashtag #MMIW. Our aim is to think about the potentialities for coalition building between and among different but similar movements and lived experiences, and to think about what it means for the actual, structural organizing for a movement.
When I talk about this with students, I discuss the United Farm Workers Movement as a contrasting example. That movement was anchored in the leadership of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. What is interesting about the relationship between social media and organizing is that it creates conditions where you do not necessarily have to have a central leader or a figurehead to get things done. With the Missing Murdered Indigenous Women’s movement and Ni Una Menos, journalists and small concentrated groups of activists help start these movements, but they do not play the same leadership roles you see in more traditional organizing before social media.
In one of the chapters that Stevie and I have published where we talk about this in more detail [“Social Media, Digital Assemblies, and Social Movement Activism and Organizing”], we discuss, both theoretically and practically, what the advent of social media means for political organizing. Do you need to have a centralized leader or a centralized group of leaders for protests to come together and for individuals to organize and get the work done? What are the pros and cons of having a leaderless rebellion versus a rebellion with a formal leadership? Would it be more effective or safer for an organization to be so large, a protest to be so massive, that instead of having one or two key players or key faces, you have just large masses of individuals organizing for a particular cause? We have not come to a firm decision. This is still something we are working with and thinking through, but it is a very important part of the organizing process, nonetheless.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Your scholarship builds on intersectional Chicana feminism both as a research methodology in health communication and media and journalism studies, and as an approach to pedagogy, mentorship, and political activism. Would you introduce us to this critical orientation and how it guides your research and praxis?
[Dr. Leandra Hernández] When I was an undergraduate, I took a course on feminist theory and philosophies. In that class, there was one week of women of color feminisms, during which we had one reading from a Latina, one reading from a Black scholar, and one reading from an Asian scholar. It was, “Check, check, check,” and that was supposed to fill the boxes at that point in time. I was assigned Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa. How I had not found out about Gloria Anzaldúa before that point in time, especially because I had already been reading literature by Sandra Cisneros and other Chicana and Latina writers, I have no idea. I lovingly tell my parents that I blame them for that.
When I read Borderlands, I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, this is actually something I can relate to, something I can see myself written into.” Because Gloria Anzaldúa was from Texas, she wrote about being a queer Chicana and a Mexican American woman in Texas. She wrote about what it meant and felt like to straddle the border between Mexico and the United States, especially if you are not first generation and you are dealing with issues of acculturation and assimilation. For example, because of the language loss that often results from assimilation, you may not speak Spanish or not speak it as well. I remember clinging to that book thinking, “I need more of this.”
If you are new to Chicana feminism, you can think about it in relation to Black feminist thought and Asian American thought. It privileges the lived experience of Chicanas as a central epistemological entry point. We are thinking about what it means to be separated from your homeland. This is often Mexico, but I have colleagues and loved ones who have gravitated towards Chicana feminisms, even though they are not Mexican: maybe they are Ecuadorian, Venezuelan, or from somewhere else in Latin America.
Chicana feminisms think about the histories of the Chicana experience in the United States: about our struggles with land, colonization, and mestizaje. [The concept of mestizaje refers to the idea that Latin America is defined by racial, ethnic, and cultural “mixture,” which both describes the unique complexity of Chicanx/Latinx identity as it relates to race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, and nationality, which can also obscure the continuing problems of racism, anti-Indigeneity, and colonialism in Latin America. Dr. Hernández recommends those interested in this complex concept read Raquel Moreira’s “The anti-Black logic of mestizaje: Reckoning with Anzaldúa’s New Mestiza legacy,” published in Communication and Race.]
For me, Chicana feminisms have not only become a central part of my scholarship when I am thinking about transnational reproductive violence or the role of news framing therein, but also inform the way I think about my teaching and my mentorship. Much of the work that I have done in these spaces builds upon Chicana feminist scholars who talk about the need to honor vivencias, or lived experiences. I love how Dolores Delgado Bernal and several other scholars have talked about this. They ask, “How can we best honor the conversations that take place at the kitchen table and the knowledge produced there and then bring that to our relationships with our students in the classroom?”
Of course, the idea of honoring vivencias does not just relate to my relationships with my Chicana/o/x, Latina/o/x, and/or queer students. It applies to all of my students. For several years, I taught in military dominant or military-only spaces. That concept applies there, too. How can you best honor and support your students when they are trying to do their degree while working virtually from a war zone or while they are dealing with the transition from military life to civilian life? Deploying these concepts involves honoring their Chicana foundations, but gives you the freedom and the flexibility to think about how you can apply them with all students and communities.
[MastersinCommunications.com] As you just mentioned, another thread of your research concerns your work with “military-affiliated learners,” or students who serve in the military and their family members. For example, you co-edited and contributed to Supporting the Military-Affiliated Learner: Communication Approaches to Military Pedagogy and Education and Military Spouses with Graduate Degrees: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Thriving Amidst Uncertainty. Would you provide some background on your interest in this area of study and what applying critical feminist perspectives in communication studies to military-affiliated pedagogy has allowed you to contribute to this field of research?
[Dr. Leandra Hernández] If you look at my CV, it is like a journal of all of my lived experiences transposed into academic titles. The military communication affiliation came about because I am a military spouse. When I was younger, I never envisioned that it would have been part of my career in the way that it is now, if even at all.
For multiple generations, my family has served in the military, dating all the way back to the Civil War. But, as I mentioned in a talk that I recently gave at San José State University, the service was always done by men. Both of my grandfathers served in the US Army during World War II. Several of my uncles and cousins have served in a variety of combat situations. My great grandfathers were in the military. The list goes on and on.
Still, intergenerationally, many of the women in my family received the message that the military was not a place for us. It was not a safe place. It was not something you should do. Women should prioritize education or other postgraduate pursuits, not the military. I was taught the military was not an option for me, but sometimes I still think that, if I had known I could have become a public affairs officer in the military after I got my bachelor’ degree, I might have just done that instead of going to graduate school.
My entrance into working in military education came through my husband. We met when I was an undergraduate, but we broke up for a time because I knew I was going to graduate school and he was less certain about his path. Little did I know, he was already thinking about joining the Navy. After we broke up, he was commissioned as an officer. We connected a year later, when I was getting ready to go to Texas A&M for my Ph.D., and he was between his first and second duty station. We decided to stick together and see what happened. Now we have been together for about 15 years.
When I was finishing up my Ph.D., I took my fourth year to live with him in San Diego. That is when I started teaching on military bases. From 2014 to 2018, I was a wandering scholar. I worked as a traveling adjunct. I taught domestically, and I taught in Japan. I did not want to try to get a tenure track job at that time, because it would mean we would have to live apart for an indefinite amount of time, during which I would be separated from the base, community support initiatives, and other resources like I was during my Ph.D. program. I thought if I ever got a tenure track job in my lifetime, it would probably be way down the line.
When I was teaching predominantly military student groups from 2014 to 2018, I learned what it feels like for active-duty service members and military spouses to be managing and negotiating so many parts of their lives while trying to get a bachelor’s degree. You are dealing with PTSD, you are dealing with trauma, you are dealing with deployments. For military spouses who were my students, I knew what they were going through, because they were separated from their families and their social support systems. They were having trouble finding meaningful employment — military spouses are hugely underemployed and unemployed.
That was really where the concept of “honoring” started to materialize in my pedagogy, because you cannot just tell a student, “Hey, you missed your quiz, you are getting a zero,” when they have shoddy internet access on a military base in Afghanistan, or they are deployed on a ship somewhere in the Pacific Ocean and communications could go down for weeks, so they do not have access to the internet. That was also when I was able to make connections with military-affiliated communication scholars as well, like Victoria McDermott, Amy May, and several of my other colleagues. I noticed that there were many military-affiliated children, spouses, and veterans in our field who were doing similar work. We just did not have a division at NCA yet, so we were not quite sure how to connect.
Altogether, being a military spouse — and now a veteran spouse to a person who is 100% disabled according to the US government, which is a whole other layer of identity and vivencia [lived experience] — has helped me see the value of advocacy for military-affiliated learners and family members in ways that I would have never thought about beforehand.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Has your background in journalism and your experiences teaching in military education given you resources for thinking about applying critical perspectives on race and gender in accessible or public-facing ways?
[Dr. Leandra Hernández] That is one of the central questions I am working through now in a piece with Sarah [De Los Santos Upton] and my dear friend, Raisa Alvarado. We are analyzing forced separation at the US-Mexico border from a practice-based perspective. How can we develop a Chicana feminist journalism approach or a Chicana feminist toolkit that could inform how journalists are talking about forced separation at the border?
This toolkit is informed by other frameworks, too, like “Fault Lines,” which is a journalism framework created by Robert Maynard, where he talks about how we can best help people come together along identity fault lines and write a story that thinks meaningfully about cultural context when talking about race, gender, and violence. It is also informed by intersectional feminisms because we are thinking about how multiple systems of oppression interact to disadvantage and marginalize different communities. We bring in some aspects of trauma-informed journalism. It is also informed by our collective experiences as Chicana feminists and Mexican and Mexican American women.
The idea is to create strategies, which we can work with journalists to further develop, refine, and implement, to talk about forced separation at the border in meaningful, historically informed, contextually specific ways, as opposed to repeating a variety of problematic themes and frames that have already been used.
[MastersinCommunications.com] You have served in a variety of leadership positions for the National Communication Association, including as Vice Chair of the Activism and Social Justice Division, Chair of the Health Communication Division, and Chair of the Feminist and Gender Studies Division. Could you highlight a few of the projects you have found most meaningful in your service and reflect on the larger value you place in mentoring as a means for advancing equity in higher education, as detailed in your piece, “Pedagogy and Mentorship as Organizational Changemaking: An Autoethnographic Vignette Approach”?
[Dr. Leandra Hernández] I have a hard time saying no when it comes to hanging out with people I care about and multi-year commitments [laughs]. If you do not know how service operates at the National Communication Association, most of the time, the divisions, caucuses, and interest groups will have executive committees of four to five individuals that rotate through leadership roles. That is important, because you get to co-mentor one another and you have institutional knowledge on the board. For example, in the Latino Communication Studies Division and La Raza Caucus, I rotated through the positions of Secretary, Vice Chair Elect, Vice Chair, Chair, and then Immediate Past Chair. I did the same thing for the Feminist and Gender Studies Division and the Health Communication Division. I am currently Vice Chair Elect in the Activism and Social Justice Division, which makes sense, given my personal and political commitments.
Chicana feminist investments in bridge-building and space-making drive my approach to this service. Stevie Munz and I have a few publications that talk about space making in more detail, thinking about how we can more equitably bring communities together to lift up marginalized voices and ensure that everyone’s needs are being heard and recognized. How can we build community in radically amazing ways? I see these questions partly through the lens of critical love. We all need space and connection. The scholarly community we engage with at NCA is supposed to represent our people. How can we make change, not just in our divisions and caucuses, but also outward for the rest of the organization?
In my time with the Latino Studies Division and the La Raza Caucus, I was fortunate enough to have been one of the co-founders of our mentorship program, which we started ideating in 2015 and got off the ground in 2016 and 2017. Now every year at NCA, we have a mentorship panel and a gathering where we bring together individuals in our division and caucus, as well as anyone else who wants to join. One of our jokes is, “You don’t have to be Brown to clown.” You can just come hang out, regardless of what your identity is.
We make it an intentional networking space so that individuals can talk to each other and share teaching and research ideas. If they need a space to commiserate for whatever reason, they have that. If they need a space to envision a radical transformation, they have that. Or, if you are just too terrified to talk to your favorite senior scholar, guess what? There they are sitting at a table, now is your chance to go talk to them.
The La Raza Mentorship Initiative was one of the first for the caucuses at NCA. We love that today there are so many other divisions and caucuses that are holding their mentorship initiatives, pre-conferences, and more. It is just so important for everyone to be able to find their people at NCA. That is one of the most meaningful parts of my service in any of the divisions and caucuses. It really highlights the Chicana feminist ethos of community building, bridge building, and space making.
It is similar to the work that the Health Communication Division has been doing in recent years, with Kate Magsamen-Conrad, Ambar Basu, and several other incredible scholars saying, “We need to make diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) a key factor in our programming. We are going to think about it in our submission reviews. We are going to think about it with the panels that we highlight.”
How can we bring more voices to the table? How can we best support our graduate students and show them we want them here when they are facing funding limitations or other obstacles? Whether they are using the language of DEI, space making, or community building, so many of NCA’s divisions are now making supporting their members an intentional focus.
I co-wrote a piece a few years ago, “La Raza Mentorship Initiative: Creating a Fortifying Pathway for Mentorship Within Our Caucus,” with Amanda R. Martinez, Carlos A. Tarin, and Jaime Guzmán, who are the other co-founders of the La Raza Mentorship Initiative. If anyone is interested in a blueprint for creating a similar program in their institution or their convention, we detail in the chapter how we created it, why we needed it, and what we have been doing with it so far.
The piece you mention in your question appears in Communication and Organizational Changemaking for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, which was co-edited by Bobbi J. Van Gilder, Jasmine T. Austin, and Jacqueline S. Bruscella. It is a really great book and resource for anyone interested in organizational change. In that book, the chapter I wrote with Stevie and one of our former students, Elizabeht Hernandez, talks about some of the wins and some of the struggles we experienced while trying to enact DEI-related change at a previous institution. We talk a little bit about the institutional context, the student body, and things of that nature.
If anyone is interested in any sort of organizational change-making or activism, we discuss what we have been trying to do for the last several years, identify enablers and facilitators to change, and offer recommendations for administrators. How those recommendations will be received remains to be determined.
[MastersinCommunications.com] Based on your experience and expertise, do you have advice you would give to students interested in feminist approaches to health communication, media and journalism studies, and/or reproductive justice, who are considering pursuing a graduate degree in communication studies or a related field?
[Dr. Leandra Hernández] The University of Utah has a great graduate program. I am not just saying that because I am here or I am biased. [laughs] Really, though, it is so important to research institutions, look at the faculty members there, and see if there are individuals that you could see yourself working with, who could guide you and mentor you. Faculty members love it when you email them and say, “I am thinking about pursuing a graduate program, can we hop on a 30-minute call?”
Email the directors of graduate studies, and reach out to faculty members you are interested in working with. If you are going to a regional conference or an NCA event, see if the faculty members are there, and go to the graduate parties. That is why they exist. We are trying to make space for you all to come meet with us and have conversations, so put in the work to get to know people. It is also helpful to find alums of programs that you are interested in, to learn about what previous graduate students thought and felt when they were enrolled.
If you have questions about division mentorship initiatives at NCA, about applying for graduate programs, or figuring out whether you might be good for a certain space, please send me an email, and I would be happy to connect you to folks in the field who can help. All you need to do is just have one person who can connect you, and the mentorship and the networking can really take off from there. When I was in grad school, I was too terrified to talk to anyone, but you do not have to be. Let us help you do that work. I sincerely mean that.
Thank you, Dr. Leandra Hinojosa Hernández, for sharing your important work on activist and media discourses surrounding gender violence and reproductive justice, communication approaches to supporting military-affiliated learners, and Chicana feminist approaches to scholarship and pedagogy!
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.
