Armory 102A
C. Kay Weaver is the chair of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design and a professor of Public Relations. Her research focuses on the socio-cultural role and impacts of public relations and strategic communication in its many forms, from corporate for-profit and government, to non-profit, non-government, charity and activist communication.
A qualitative researcher, she explores how public communication leverages political, social and/or cultural identities, subjectivities interests, discourses and actions. This includes empirical examination and theorizing of how groups, especially women and issues-based activists, engage with communication technologies and are represented, and/or represent themselves in communication campaigns. Over her research career, she has had an additional focus on how violence, and especially violence against women, is represented in the media and in strategic communication campaigns.
Having gained over US$3 million in external award funding as, variously, principal investigator and a member of grant-winning teams, she is co-author of Women Viewing Violence, Cameras in the Commons, and Violence and the Media, and is co-editor of Critical Readings: Violence and the Media and Public Relations in Global Contexts: Multi-Paradigmatic Perspectives. She has published numerous book chapters as well as articles in, among other journals, Public Relations Review, Journal of Public Relations Research, International Journal of Advertising, Media Culture & Society, New Media and Society, Information, Communication & Society, Feminist Media Studies and the Journal of Applied Communication Research. Her current work includes co-editing the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Public Relations.
Weaver is on the editorial boards of Public Relations Inquiry, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Communication Management, Crime, Media and Society, Media International Australia, Communication Research and Practice and the Asia Pacific Public Relations Journal.
Weaver joins the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design from the University of Waikato in New Zealand where she served as Professor of Management Communication, Dean of the School of Graduate Research and Pro Vice-Chancellor of Postgraduate Research. She has a PhD from the University of Stirling in Scotland.