I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern State University. I received my PhD from the University of Iowa in 2012. My advisor was Kristine Muñoz.

• What LSI pieces of writing have inspirational to you as a researcher?

I switched my research focus from media to language and culture in my second year of graduate study. Donal Carbaugh’s “Fifty Terms for Talk” was the first article my advisor introduced to me and led me to the LSI field. It inspired me to look for native terms and to develop my research on the sajiao culture in Taiwan. Kristine Muñoz’s “Cultural Persuadables” was another article that played a key role in the last stage of my dissertation writing. This piece ignited ideas that helped me re-examine the concepts of culture and articulate various discourses of the native term to explore the relationship between language and communication.

• What research questions you are currently exploring?

The sajiao culture that I have studied is a form of persuasion that relies on a passive and dependent gesture. Continuing in the same vein, I am interested in public apologies performed by politicians, sports players, and celebrities in televised press conferences in Taiwan. Instead of a solemn, deliberate manuscript speech, those public figures tend to apologize for their misdeeds with tears, sobs, and wails. I would like to analyze the elements of this ritualized apology and explore the symbolic meanings of this performance in the given society by transcribing and analyzing press conference clips collected in the past five years in which a public figure was involved to give an apologizing speech (performance).

Website: http://www.nsuok.edu/directory/profile/yueh.aspx