Alaina Zanin

Alaina Zanin joined the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication as an assistant professor in fall 2017. After earning her doctorate in communication from the University of Oklahoma, Zanin worked for two years as an assistant professor at the University of Central Missouri where she taught business communication in the management department.

Zanin’s research focuses on the intersections of health and organizational communication. She is specifically interested in issues of discourse and identity negotiation in unconventional organizational contexts (e.g., life enrichment groups, non-traditional organizations, sports teams, healthcare organizations). Her dissertation was an ethnography of two American collegiate Division I athletic programs (i.e., football and women’s track) and described how organizational members were able to resist managerial influence collectively in the absence of talk through overlapping identifications. Her research utilizes structuration, sensemaking and framing theories, and focuses on issues concerning power, resistance, and body work. Zanin’s rigorous plan of research is exemplified by her recent publications in Management Communication Quarterly, and Small Group Research.

During her graduate work, Zanin had the opportunity to work on a grant-funded, qualitative, longitudinal study of gynecological cancer patients and providers. A paper from this dataset was published in Qualitative Health Research and another earned a top paper award in the health communication division at the National Communication Association’s 2015 convention.

Currently, Zanin is working on a subset of her dissertation data which focuses on the negotiation of athlete injury in the context of a NCAA DI football training room. This dataset and analysis will include ethnographic data which traces the negotiation of athlete injuries over time. A manuscript from this dataset is currently under review.