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Stacey Connaughton

Stacey Connaughton

Professor // Communication
Faculty

Professor // Cornerstone
Faculty

Director of the Purdue Policy Research Institute

Director of the Purdue Peace Project

Affiliated Faculty // Global Studies // SIS
Faculty

Affiliated Faculty // Latin American Studies // SIS
Faculty

Office and Contact

Room: BRNG 2176

Office hours: Spring 2024: Wednesday; 3:30-5:00pm

Email: sconnaug@purdue.edu

Phone: (765) 494-9107

Get to Know Professor Stacey Connaughton

My primary research interests are leadership, political violence prevention, and policy. My primary teaching interests are identity and identification, leadership, and peacebuilding.

I typically work with graduate students who are interested in identity, leadership, engaged scholarship, organizational communication, Africa, Latin America, peacebuilding and development. My approach to graduate mentoring aligns with my Discovery and Engagement foci. I try to help develop each graduate student’s own leadership in discovery, learning, and engagement while attending to the entire human being during that process. Mentoring graduate students, for me, involves exposing them to as many new opportunities as possible. For me, a key part of mentoring is to give graduate students the space and opportunities to lead, and for me to coach them along the way. That includes giving graduate students the opportunity to develop as mentors and teachers.

I believe my role as major professor is not only to help graduate students select coursework, to assist them in applying for internal grant support, and to advise their Masters theses or dissertations, but also to mentor them on the publication process and on teaching. That commitment extends to graduate students who are not my advisees as well. I talk with graduate students about the peer-review process and try to encourage them not to give up; I give them opportunities to be lead author on manuscripts. I encourage them to involve themselves in professional engagement opportunities. I try to make myself consistently present in graduate students’ professional lives. We publish together, we practice presentations together, we talk about teaching, we talk about the various facets of universities...importantly, we get things done and we support each other while doing them.

Education

Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin
Joint M.A. University of Texas at Austin
B.A. Saint Olaf College

 
Biography
Stacey L. Connaughton (Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin) is a Professor in the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University and the Director of the Purdue Policy Research Institute (PPRI) in Purdue’s Discovery Park. Her research examines leadership and multi-stakeholder organizing, most recently in the context of political violence prevention initiatives. Dr. Connaughton serves as Director of the Purdue Peace Project (PPP), housed in the Purdue Policy Research Institute. As Director of PPP, Dr. Connaughton has led the multi-stakeholder relationship building, project development, and (participatory) monitoring and evaluation for locally led political violence prevention initiatives in Ghana, Liberia, and Nigeria. In these efforts, she has worked closely with media organizations, government, private sector, NGOs, civil society, and everyday citizens – both those who affect violence and those affected by violence. From that body of work, Dr. Connaughton has developed what she calls the Local Leadership Model of political violence prevention and the Relationally Attentive Approach to doing engaged scholarship (i.e., academic-practitioner political violence prevention collaborations). Central to all of this work is helping to inspire everyday citizens to be critical thinkers, problem solvers, effective communicators, and leaders as they work together to address issues that affect their communities. Dr. Connaughton’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, USAID, the Carnegie Corporation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Ford Motor Company, and the Indiana Department of Transportation, and she has secured more than $3 million in gift funds. Dr. Connaughton served as a thought leader on distributed leadership for the U.S. Army Research Institute’s Leader Development Unit. She was a consultant to USAID’s Liberia Strategic Analysis program where she led the development of a mentorship program and leadership curriculum designed to develop the next generation of Liberian leaders. She has been invited to present her research on virtual teams and leadership to industry, military, and higher educational audiences, and has facilitated workshops and written guidebooks in the areas of virtual teams, leadership, teambuilding, strategic planning, and effective communication in North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Dr. Connaughton teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in qualitative research methods, leadership, and political violence prevention. She is the recipient of several teaching awards, Purdue’s 2017 Faculty Engaged Scholar Award, the 2020 Purdue Provost’s Graduate Mentor Award, and Purdue’s 2018 Trailblazer Award – an award given to a midcareer tenured faculty member for innovation and impact in research. Dr. Connaughton is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Communication and she serves on several Editorial Boards. Dr. Connaughton has served as the Associate Head and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue and as the Associate Chair of Purdue University’s Social Sciences Institutional Review Board.
 
Grants and Gifts
  • 2020    Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT). Design of educational material & public awareness campaigns for improving work zone driver safety. SPR 4522 Public Awareness/Education. Gkritza, K. (PI), Connaughton, S. L. (co-PI). $137,960.00.
  • 2020    Ford Motor Company. Design of novel, reconfigurable interiors for AVs (autonomous vehicles). Gkritza, K. (PI), Connaughton, S. L. (co-PI) $201,000.00
  • 2020    Purdue Research Foundation Research Grant. Proposing a communicative model to evaluate local community networks: An exploration of county level public health departments in Indiana. Connaughton, S. L., & Rawat, M. $25,000.00
  • 2019    Purdue Research Foundation Research Grant. Narrating (in)fertility: Developing resilience through tenuous identities. Connaughton, S. L., & Jarvis, C. $20,000.00
  • 2018    Purdue Research Foundation Research Grant. Women and the brilliant jerks they work with: Sexism and policy knowledge construction in the sharing economy. Connaughton, S. L., & Martinez, E. $20,000.00
  • 2014    Benjamin Franklin Summer Institute, U.S. State Department. Rapoport, A. (PI) & Connaughton, S. L. (co-PI)
  • 2013    Benjamin Franklin Summer Institute, U.S. State Department. Rapoport, A. (PI), Brule, D. (co-PI), & Connaughton, S. L. (co-PI).
 
Select Publications

Kellett, P. M., Connaughton, S. L., & Cheney, G. (Eds., 2020, in production). Transforming conflict and building peace: Community engagement strategies for communication scholarship. New York: Peter Lang. Vol. 1.  ISBN: 978-1-4331-7902-0

Connaughton, S. L., & Berns, J. (Eds., 2019). Locally led peacebuilding: A closer look. Chapters from academics and practitioners in Colombia, Guatemala, Kenya, Iraq, Liberia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Somaliland, Sri Lanka, Uganda, the United Kingdom, and the United States.  Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 

Kuang, K., Connaughton, S. L., Anaele, A., Vibber, K. S., Krishna, A., & Linabary, J. (in press). Extending communication campaigns from health context to peacebuilding context: A locally driven communication campaign approach in a peacebuilding initiative in Liberia. Health Communication. DOI: 10.1080/10410236.2019.1602818

Connaughton, S. L., & Ptacek, J. (2020). Doing engaged scholarship: When theory on inclusion meets practice in the context of a peacebuilding initiative in West Africa. In M. Doerfel & J. L. Gibbs (Eds.). Building inclusiveness in organizations, institutions, and communities: Communication theory perspectives (pp. 43-57). New York: Routledge.

Connaughton, S.L. (2019). The strategic politics of peace. In R. Heath, & W. Johanssen (Eds.). The International Encyclopedia of Strategic Communication. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119010722.iesc0202

Connaughton, S. L., Vibber, K., Krishna, A., Linabary, J., & Štumberger, N. (2018). Theorizing corporate-community relationships and the role of contextual factors in peacebuilding and beyond. Journal of Asia Pacific Communication, 28, 1-19. DOI: 10.1075/japc.00001.con

Connaughton, S.L., Linabary, J.R., Krishna, A., Kuang, K., Anaele, A., Vibber, K.S., Yakova, L., & Jones, C. (2017). Explicating a relationally attentive approach to conducting engaged communication scholarship. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 45, 517–536. DOI:10.1080/00909882.2017.138270

Website

Visit the Purdue Policy Research Institute.

Visit the Purdue Peace Project.