David Boromisza-Habashi

David Boromisza-Habashi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication. He is an ethnographer of communication who studies the relationship between culture, communication, and mobility. His empirical research focuses on the ways communication facilitates the movement of various forms of speaking across linguistic, socio-cultural, and national boundaries. He is particularly interested in how speakers assign value to speech, and what role value plays in the global circulation of speech genres such as Anglo-American public speaking and metadiscursive terms such as “hate speech” and “communication.” This work has appeared in such venues as Communication Theory, Human Communication Research, the International Journal of Communication, the Annals of the International Communication Association, the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, and the Journal of Multicultural Discourses.

His current ethnographic research project investigates how public speaking is communicatively constituted as a mobile speech genre in the undergraduate public speaking course in the United States and China. This research creates opportunities for evaluating the potential of public speaking education to enhance democratic participation, and for advancing theories of value, cultural discourse, speech community, and speech economy.