Interview with Dr. Lynn Cockett, Juniata College, USA

Lynn Cockett, a Communications Professor from Juniata College in the U.S, Pennsylvania, a partner university of Masaryk University, recently visited Brno to give a lecture: “Communication in the Crisis: The Lockdown Period in the US During the "Spring Pandemic" of 2020”. I had the privilege to pick her brain on everything starting from the evolution of celebrity through social media, her unique approach to teaching, including the class “The Cultural effect of Cinderella” to how Covid-19 is actually changing modern architecture.

When starting her Ph.D. program at Rutgers University, Professor Cockett thought Library Science would be her main focus, since she had loved working at the U.S Public library so much. As she started her doctoral program, which combined Library Science and Communication, she quickly realized that communication theory was a much better match for what she actually wanted to study and switched her focus halfway through her Ph.D.

“My Ph.D. dissertation was about the concept of practice and personhood - who I am informs how I do my work. I was interested in how the issues of personhood were evident in the way that the librarians did their work… I studied a bunch of librarians who were on a National Committee to make decisions about doing library services for teenagers in the United States. I wanted to hear how do they talk about teenagers when they are not in the room. I used communication theory to understand the work practices of librarians so it was a really good marriage of two.”

Professor Cockett firmly believes that understanding communication can be of help any job that requires working with other people.

“One of my favorite communication theorists is a guy named Robert Craig and he says communication is a most practical discipline. What he means by that isn't necessarily that if you take communications classes, you can learn skills in communication, but you learn these theoretical approaches to understanding how communication works.”

For someone who’s not familiar with the field of communication, the discipline may look more technical than it actually is.

“Sometimes, people who don't know what we do in communication don't understand that it’s a serious academic discipline. But I think when you say you are a communication student, people think that you are learning how to do technical things on tv or radio shows. And sometimes my students take a communications class and they have no idea what that means but they come to understand that it's really interesting to investigate your social world. People also don't realize how it is connected with so many other disciplines”

For Professor Cockett, studying communication theory helps not only in the work environment but in personal relationships as well. She shares with me an example from her very own family life.

“My husband and I had never had a fight - We have discussions. We are both language people so through my study of communication I’ve learned how my communication style impacts other people and how to listen differently.”

One of the first things you will learn at Lynn’s classes is that everything we say has both a thought and a feeling.

“I can say to you, “Will you pass me this pitcher?” and that's a request, but I can say it so many different ways, and how I say it tells you something about what I think about you. So if I say “Gimme that!” or if I say “Would you please hand me that?” it’s the same thing - I’m asking you to do something, but the way I phrase it is indicative of our relationship. Once people learn that it helps with a lot of misunderstandings”

When I ask her what she thinks is the most fascinating recent development in the field of communication, Professor Cockett brings up the topic of Instagram as a medium for identity construction and repair.

“Reality TV celebrities use Instagram to promote their own selves, they go directly to their camera, they just do an Instagram live and there is no mediator, no editor, no producer. Normally before we had this very easy way to project everything out into the world, whatever a person in the media had to say had to go through a production company. Now it goes straight to the viewer and what the celebrities are doing is encouraging the viewer to develop parasocial relationships and through doing that they maintain their celebrity.“

Parasocial relationships are one-sided, one person invests a lot of time, energy into sustaining the relationship while the other person is completely unaware of the other’s existence. What makes parasocial relationships so appealing for people is that they negate the chance of rejection and they encourage individuals to identify with the person of their choosing.

Lynn asks me if I have something resembling a parasocial relationship with people I follow online which, as a 20-something with access to the internet and a phone, I do. She then describes a familiar process - Your favorite content creator pops up on the screen, with each new video or a post you feel like you know them better and then they start to develop relationships with sponsors, promote sponsored content and you are much more likely to go and buy that product.

We eventually land on the topic of Instagram apologies, getting canceled online, and the sneaky way most celebrities avoid accountability.

“When you get to know the people in the reality TV world, eventually someone says something dumb, makes a mistake and is about to get canceled, so they go straight to their Instagram story, not on their main page, and they do an Instagram story when they apologize. In the U.S, it's always something racist. What I find fascinating is the structural grammar of the Instagram apology and how it functions. They only do it in their stories, so it goes away because if they put it on their main grid, people will forever remember that they did that bad thing.“

When asked about the most interesting revelations she’s had regarding the social effects of the Pandemic, Professor Cockett, just like Professor Bernadette Nadya-Jaworsky, says it was radically different for everyone involved.

“The biggest thing I came away with was how for so many people Covid was so differently experienced. In the work from home thing, for some people, it was like a vacation, I loved it. But I have two colleagues whose children started kindergarten in front of the computer and they hated it. These children hated school before they ever stepped into school and that's sad. Most kids don't hate school before fourth or fifth grade! What was really highlighted for me was the different ways that people processed their changing relationship around having to negotiate their home and in ways they never had to before”

But turns out Covid-19 didn’t just affect us, it also changed the U.S home design trends.

“Tracey Mcmillin Cottom writes opinion pieces for the New York Times and she's been going on home tours, of new homes built since Covid. In the past 30 years, the U.S home design has been open floor plans with tons of place and not a lot of rooms. We are going back to building many small rooms because all these parents need to get away from their kids! So people are building yoga rooms and offices, they are chopping up their houses so they can have private space. Covid has completely changed the contemporary architecture of our living environments. And that I think is fascinating. “

Apart from Covid and Instagram, Lynn shares that her students at Juniata seem to be really interested in gender and race studies.

“One of the things people like about those classes is that they see how you can make communication theory relevant to every aspect of your social life. I teach a class about women in the workplace, - “Women, Work, and Identity” and it’s always fun because women, men, nonbinary and transgender people all take that class.”

I ask her if the demographics of this particular class have changed at all over the last few years. Turns out more and more men are interested in learning about gender.

“In the beginning, it was almost exclusively women and almost exclusively straight white women, and as I saw the demographics shifting I had to shift the content of the class. When I first taught the class I would ask on the first day, who’s the feminist, and out of 20 people maybe 2 would raise their hands and now they take the class because they are feminists.“

While doing a bit of background research on Lynn I came across one of the classes in Juniata, The Cultural Effect of Cinderella. Turns out at Juniata taking an unconventional route is not only acceptable but it’s encouraged.

“When I was in my Master's program I was researching Childrens’ literature and I was a Children’s librarian. For my Master’s thesis, I wrote about how Cinderella's story was developed and has spread around the world over many years. So I traced Cinderella through different cultures and studied folklore and took all of that research and turned it into a course that looks at that story. There are five themes in every Cinderella story and we research them across cultures and compare how the themes are identified in different Cinderella stories around the world. Students then choose a culture and a time they are interested in studying and they write an original Cinderella story set in the culture that they studied. Students have written about the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ancient Rome, Tiananmen square, and even American Dustball.”

That’s not the only distinctive class from Professor Cockett. She also teaches the class in the Theatre Department called “The Theatre of the Observed” which focuses on the concept of empathy. This is one of the “connections classes” at Juniata, taught by two professors and meant to demonstrate how two separate disciplines can connect. During the course, students learn theories about empathy but they also conduct interviews under Lynn’s supervision and then turn those interviews into a play. Lynn believes that this process helps the students to get more in touch with their empathy.

“I think we could all be better at empathy and communication and social psychology theory tells us that empathy increases pro-social behavior, and so more emphatic you feel, the more likely you are to do good things for others, and I and my teaching partner really believe in that as a way to live.”

When I asked her about her favorite course to teach she brings up the “Women, Work, and Identity” but surprisingly, she also mentioned her “Research Methods” class.

“Students don't know how fun Research Methods can be. I teach qualitative methods, observation interviews, discourse analysis, and in the last couple of years, the class is focused on health inequality so everything we read is qualitative research on health inequality. In the US, healthcare isn’t free. It's a huge problem so we look at how poverty affects health, how race impacts health, how people are treated in healthcare environments. I get students who are in chemistry and biology and they are blown away that I am not using numbers because they didn't think that would be real science. And what’s exciting about having scientists and people who are going to be doctors I'm helping them understand how their patients are not just bodies and they have human lives and stories.“

When she’s not teaching, Lynn dedicated her time as a scientist to researching identity.

“If you look at my CV it looks like my research is about so many things, but it's always about identity, about how who we are is socially constructed in our relationships and communication. I’ve done that in the context of education, group decision making, or community conflict but the theme is always who we are informs how we behave and how that behavior then informs who we are”. 

Students can apply to spend a semester at Juniata college through the Centre for International Cooperation. More information about the application process can be found here: https://czs.muni.cz/en/mu-student/study-placements/partner-universities

You can find Lynn Cocketts’s recent publications below:

Instructor Communication across Two Contexts: An Examination of Teaching Online and Face-to-Face, LS Cockett. 2015

The practice of public meetings: Introduction to the special issue J Leighter, LW Black, LS Cockett, L Jarmon International Journal of Public Participation 3 (2), 1-13 10, 2009

Territory, Identity, and Conflict in a Public Meeting: A Natural History Approach. LS Cockett International Journal of Public Participation 3 (2) 2009