During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, life for many people shifted online, with much of their activities circulating on and within social media platforms. One such social media platform that received a significant uptick in users was TikTok, which the BBC reported logged 800 million users and was the most downloaded app of 2020. Occurring simultaneously with this shift online was a phenomenon colloquially termed “queerantine,” which refers to a phenomenon occurring over the course of the pandemic in which a straight-identifying person shifted to identifying as queer. Influenced by theories of compulsory heterosexuality and queer performativity, this study aims to identify how socio-technical affordances of TikTok introduce and circulate symbols and inscribe activities that bear upon an individual’s understanding of their sexual orientation. Taking an ethnographic approach, I engaged in participant observation with content groups over TikTok during 2021 as well as conducted in-depth interviews with individuals who identified as experiencing queerantine. Data was analyzed using qualitative thematic analysis. Additionally, with the aforementioned shift online came minimized exposure to physically and traditionally heteronormative spaces; preliminary analysis has shown that for a number of TikTok users, the decrease — or to an extent absence — of compulsory heterosexuality (aka comphet) on certain spaces of TikTok affected their understanding of their sexuality. Moreover, results speak to how LGBTQIA+ counterpublics on TikTok participate in processes of community identification and formation. This research broadens our understanding of the mobilization of counterpublics and the mediation of content through group-specific spaces and contributes to the growing concern of exclusionary practices of social media sites, which are often critiqued for using algorithms that enforce normative assumptions of user behaviors, echo chambers that can spur segregation between communities and spread information, as well as the geopolitics involved in the cross-national implementation of social media platforms like TikTok.

Despite extensive research addressing the distress surrounding romantic breakups, divorce, and family estrangement, hardly any scholarship has addressed the experience of friendship breakups. Friendship breakups occur when at least one person in a friendship voluntarily and intentionally decides to distance themselves from the other person because of a perceived negative relationship. These breakups, like involuntary distance from any close relationship, can be rife with stress and turmoil, but also go unacknowledged and unsupported. I am framing my study by the Communication Theory of Resilience. The purpose of this study is to understand the difficulties people experience with breaking up with a friend and how they manage those difficulties to enact resilience. When people experience difficulties, they often enact five resilience processes: (a) crafting normalcy, (b) foregrounding productive action while backgrounding negative feelings, (c) affirming identity anchors, (d) maintaining and using communication networks, and (e) putting alternative logics to work. Crafting normalcy is creating new rituals/routines; foregrounding action illustrates how people move forward; affirming identity anchors is grounding the self; maintaining networks corresponds to garnering support; alternative logics is a sense-making process to see things differently. Using data from narrative and semi-structured interviews conducted via Zoom, and based on a thematic co-occurrence analysis, this study will reveal common difficulties (i.e., resilience triggers), resilience responses, and whether particular resilience processes co-occur with specific difficulties. My findings from this research will illuminate the experience of friendship breakups and their aftermath with the goal of helping distressed people better cope with a significant relationship loss. I am in the process of conducting interviews with participants that must be 18 years of age or older, can read and write in English, and have experienced a friendship breakup. By the time of the symposium I will have 10-15 interviews completed and a draft of my thesis.

As we enter year three of the COVID-19 pandemic, the news is still awash with daily updates. For many, terms such as ‘frontline workers’ have become part of mainstream vocabulary signifying the work of medical personnel during the pandemic. Although it may be common terminology now, the phrase ‘frontline worker’ carries a long rhetorical history rooted in military medicine in the Philippines during the early 20th century. This term stems from a broader biomedical ‘war on disease’ metaphor that has pervaded pandemic rhetoric for over one hundred years. Given the historical context and the widespread use of this rhetorical tool, my research explores the following questions: How does the use of the ‘war on disease’ metaphor within mass media publicly valorize ‘frontline workers’ during the COVID-19 pandemic while also hiding the lack of safety measures taken to protect these individuals from disease? How does the history of ‘war on disease’ rhetoric and the use of this metaphor in the context of a modern pandemic continue to perpetuate the ‘heroic sacrifice’ narrative and the use of ‘magic bullet solutions’ within the medical field? What are the trends in the characterization of ‘frontline workers’ in newspaper articles throughout the U.S. and among different time periods of the pandemic? How do these rhetorical trends produce real-life disparities across forms of difference, especially race, gender, class, and ability? Using media, discourse, and historical analyses and focusing on medical rhetoric and history of rhetorical tools frameworks, my research explores the trends in the use of the term ‘frontline workers’ in prominent COVID newspaper articles from different regions of the U.S. and across different time points throughout the pandemic. I also analyze how the history of the ‘war on disease’ metaphor contributes to those rhetorical trends, and the broader social implications for those deemed ‘frontline workers’.

Societies have a range of complex problems that are unable to be solved by the efforts of one individual or organization. The complexity of these problems necessitates collaboration between organizations from multiple sectors of society to generate positive, measurable changes in the problem arena, called outcomes. Despite outcomes being a crucial element of collaborative success, it is difficult to link the actions of collaboration to outcomes in the problem area it is trying to address. Ongoing research has sought to connect elements in the collaborative process of multisector collaborations to successful outcomes. What has been missing from this academic discussion is the perspective of evaluators who are brought in to assess the success of collaborations. This study explores how evaluators from the United States and Canada view success in multisector collaborations. The research questions guiding this exploratory study are: a) How do evaluators link success within a collaboration, through its processes and outputs, to outcomes in the problem area? and b) How do evaluators approach evaluating collaborative success depending on the stage of development a collaboration is at? To answer these questions, I conducted twenty semi-structured interviews with expert evaluators via Zoom. I recruited the study’s participants through purposive sampling and referrals from other participants. I am currently analyzing the transcripts of the interviews, of which I am conducting a thematic analysis. By the time of the symposium, my analysis will be completed, and I will be ready to report my findings which will provide multifaceted answers to my research questions. Results of this study will help create a richer understanding of collaborative success and hopefully lead to new ways of optimizing evaluation.

Implications of social media on social relationships, especially those of younger people, has been widely studied in recent years as adoption of various apps grew rapidly during the late 2010s. Within this research has been a focus on the use of social media to maintain relationships. Snapchat is one of the most popular social media platforms used among Gen-Z individuals. This study investigates how college students used Snapchat during early 2021 in the COVID-19 pandemic to keep up with their friends when more typical forms of engagement were suspended. The study targeted concepts such as relational maintenance, relational closeness, relational well-being, and comparison to face-to-face communication. The study started with four virtual focus groups where I gained firsthand accounts of Snapchat use by UW students. My advisor and I then created a survey based on responses from these focus groups and administered it online to people recruited from 17 college-centric subreddits from across the United States. Results indicated a dichotomy between members of Gen-Z in their Snapchat use, where a certain portion found Snapchat to be related to positive developments within their friend group while the other portion saw the app providing an inadequate amount of closeness and maintenance. These findings suggest that Gen-Z should not be generalized as one homogenous group, but, rather, recognized as two subsets of a generation who have differing views and preferences when it comes to the influence of their virtual communication habits on their friendships. When looking at the present state of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study would be worth conducting again to identify differences now that in-person meetings have become more common.