Karen Ashcraft

Karen Lee Ashcraft is a Professor in the Department of Communication. Her scholarship examines how relations of difference – such as gender, race, and sexuality – shape varied scenes of work and organization, ranging from social services to commercial aviation to academic labor. Her research on forms of governance, culture, identity, and practice appears in such venues as Academy of Management Review, Communication Theory, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Management Communication Quarterly and has received many honors, such as AMR’s Best Article of the Year Award. She is a Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA) and recipient of the ICA Fredric M. Jablin Award for Outstanding Contributions to Organizational Communication.

Karen’s current research is focused on developing communication theory and practice attuned to the affective forces operating today, as evidenced by her 2022 book Wronged and Dangerous: Viral Masculinity and the Populist Pandemic. This work combines her background in the US Christian right with nearly three decades of studying masculinities in organizational and cultural life, bringing it all to bear on the contemporary realities of global politics and digital organizing. The result is a novel and prescient account of the rising far right, which suggests how we can meet this historical moment differently, in ways that draw people together rather than rip us apart. She thus shares with many others a guiding interest in promising responses to the daunting world unfolding before us. She also likes laughter, cats, and regular doses of singing and dancing.