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What you're looking at, those three abstracts, is almost the totality of the doctor's professional work, excluding a few book reviews and letters-to-the-editor that she has authored. And excluding her dissertation, which I just don't have the stomach to go and dig up at the moment.

Par for the course in the field of 'Communications Studies', I'm afraid. One of our Comm. Studies faculty wrote a 250 page thesis on 'A Different World', a spinoff sitcom from the Cosby show. Hard to believe this passes for scholarship. This same faculty member writes largely illiterate columns on 'racial issues' for the local lefty fish-wrap. Apparently, sentences with a subject and verb are oppressive, or something.

A few years back I came up with 'Harbison's laws of academe'. I don't remeber them all, but a couple were

Any field that goes by the name (blank)-studies is the domain of charlatans.
The easiest way to tell a science major from a humanities major is to see if the student can write in complete sentences. The science major usually can, the humanities major usually can't.
The lower the objective content a discipline has, the more likely its faculty are leftist.

Things have gotten so much worse recently, I'm considering replacing 'major' by 'professor' in rule 2.

Exactly what we'd expect from an oppressive, phallocentric, man of "science" such as you, privileging the European male experience over other equally valid narratives as you do, don't you? Admit it, sexist, capitalist, pig-dog ;)

It's not grammar that's oppressive - well, it is, if you've seen anything from the MLA over the last twenty years - but rather plain facts that are oppressive, I think. The world is not how a certain segment of academia wishes it to be, so they must wish away some of its more inconvenient aspects.

Ah, well. I think it was Plato who remarked at what an awful lot of money the Sophists seemed to be making back in the day - plus ça change, right? ;)