About

Roy Schwartzman is a Professor in the Department of Communication at NC State University, who joined the university in Fall 2023. He serves as Co-Director of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program (CWSP). Prior to his appointment at NC State, Schwartzman spent 17 years at UNC Greensboro, where he directed the Communication Across the Curriculum program and served as Head of the Department of Communication Studies. He held affiliate faculty status in several programs including Peace and Conflict Studies, Jewish Studies, Nanoscience and Nanoengineering, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research encompasses critical scholarship of teaching and learning, public communication concerning science, technology, and medicine, and the formation and remediation of propaganda and prejudice, with a particular focus on antisemitism and Holocaust survivor testimonies. Schwartzman has been recognized with awards such as a Holocaust Educational Foundation Fellowship and the USC Shoah Foundation Institute International Teaching Fellowship. He is also a published creative writer with over 150 scholarly articles and book chapters, and more than 350 poems, earning numerous research and literary awards.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Pedagogy
• Medicine
• Public relations
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Gender studies
• Law
• Media studies

Selected publications

• Cultivating Epistemic and Argumentative Resilience to Reduce Vaccine Hesitancy

  Risk, systems and decisions · 2024-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Confronting Conundrums of Care in College Student Advising

  International Conference on Gender Research · 2024-04-18

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  At colleges and universities throughout the United States, academic advisors play a central role in stemming the tide of declining student enrollment and academic underachievement—especially in the wake of academic, physical, emotional, and interpersonal setbacks incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. For many undergraduates, the mentoring relationship with their academic advisor provides the longest lasting and deepest connection with a faculty or staff member throughout their college experience. Increasingly, the expectations that institutions and students place on academic advisors have escalated far beyond simply guiding course selection and checking fulfillment of graduation requirements. While this more holistic approach to advising can cultivate a greater sense of belonging, it also places the advisors in a precarious position as the parameters of their responsibilities and the extent of caregiving continue to broaden. The ever-expanding expectations of caregiving placed on college academic advisors exemplify how pandemic-informed labor practices across many workplaces inadequately acknowledge caregivers while the care recipients may become overly dependent. This study investigates how advising evolves to become an extrapolation of the caregiving demands socially placed upon women in traditional, patriarchally structured families and workplaces. Using methods derived from critical incident theory that identify systemic crisis points and opportunities for intervention, the authors examine narratives of two women who serve as the lead advisors for their departments in southeastern United States universities. Their narratives delineate two double binds. First, the presumably bottomless reservoir of care demanded from women places nurturance of students in tension with career advancement and other care responsibilities (e.g., self and family). Second, setting boundaries to caregiving may generate accusations of insensitivity, but boundless care can accommodate and encourage learned helplessness among students. The investigation concludes with suggestions to reform institutional policies and build student resilience that equips them to learn independently.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Vaccinations in the Shadow of Eugenics

  Risk, systems and decisions · 2024-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Universal Audience: Ideological Construct or Counter-Ideological Tool?

  2024-08-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This study seeks to connect Chaim Perelman’s new rhetoric with critical theory, specifically Jürgen Habermas’ ideal speech situation, to develop a more nuanced understanding of how argumentative strategies interact with power and ideology. Juxtaposing critical analysis of Perelman’s writings with Habermas’ ideal speech situation reveals that the universal audience, although conceived as a normative ideal for rational argumentation, is itself embedded in ideological contexts. The universal audience can function as a mechanism for legitimizing institutionalized power relationships and entitling individuals to exert authority. It also, however, possesses potential as a counter-ideological tool when synthesized with the ideal speech situation. This synthesis offers a more robust, although still nascent, framework for understanding the interplay between argumentation, ideology, and power.

  PublisherDOI

• Weaponizing Resilience: Women in the Trenches and Fringes of Pandemic Pedagogy

  International Conference on Gender Research · 2023 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  This study foregrounds the conflicting social pressures that women educators in the United States face in dealing with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in higher education. Narratives from three standpoints interweave to provide three perspectives on pandemic-informed practices that can build resilience as an inclusive rather than simply an individual process. The three points of view are: a mother in a non-tenure track teaching position who juggles caregiving duties; a male department head navigating how to energize allyship within a neoliberal educational system that suppresses acknowledgment and support of caretaking; and interactions among members of the Facebook group Pandemic Pedagogy, a global social media hub for educators adjusting to the pandemic’s impact. Collectively, these standpoints constitute a critical autoethnographic multilogue to deconstruct and remediate the systemic gender inequities exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic. The three perspectives converge on implementing feminist ethics of care as both a philosophical and practical foundation for constructively cultivating resilience at the personal, community, and institutional levels.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Roles of Communication Centers in Communicating Science: A Multi-Disciplinary Forum.

  2021-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This multi-disclipinary forum addresses how Communication Centers bridge the gaps between scientists and their public constituents, provides ways to teach scientific communication from the voice of a scientist, and invokng the perspective of science and technology studies, a reflection on how to bridge epistemological divides that often lead to confrontational relationships between scientists and non-scientists is offered.

  Publisher

• Unpacking Privilege in Pandemic Pedagogy: Social Media Debates on Power Dynamics of Online Education

  Journal of Communication Pedagogy · 2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  As one of the world’s major social media hubs dedicated to online education during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Facebook mega-group Pandemic Pedagogy provides a panoramic perspective of the key concerns educators and students face amid a public health crisis that forces redefinition of what constitutes effective education. After several months of instruction under pandemic conditions, two central themes emerged as the most extensively discussed and the most intensively contested: (1) rigor versus accommodation in calibrating standards for students, and (2) ways to improve engagement during classes conducted through videoconferencing, especially via Zoom. Both themes reveal deeply embedded systems of privilege and marginalization in the structures and methods of online education. The pandemic starkly exposes disparities in access, equity, and inclusivity. Addressing these challenges will require explicit measures to acknowledge these power imbalances by rethinking what counts as effective teaching and learning rather than relying on institutions to revert to business as usual after this pandemic abates.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Risky Jews

  Advances in linguistics and communication studies · 2021-06-04

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Focusing on many previously untranslated articles in popular national magazines and newspapers, as well as works by prominent racial theorists, this chapter traces how outrage was systematically fomented against Jews in Nazi-era Germany, creating perceived imperatives for drastic discriminatory measures. Rather than locate the core of Nazi antisemitism in historical or psychological factors, this study approaches antisemitism using the theoretical framework of risk communication. The heuristics of risk perception reveal an array of rhetorical tactics that fomented visceral aversion impervious to logical refutation. Portraying Jews as embodying maximal and uncontrollable risk, political, academic, and mass media discourse converged on the theme of Jews as posing unacceptable dangers that required progressively more drastic measures to control. The principles of risk communication, especially the means of inflaming outrage, could furnish useful interpretive frames for analyzing current antisemitism and other types of repressive discourse.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• COVIDiots and Cogency

  Advances in linguistics and communication studies · 2021-06-04 · 2 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States spawns a perplexing polemic. Intransigent coronavirus skeptics who defy public health recommendations often get cast as ideological zealots or as perniciously ignorant. Both characterizations overlook a more fundamental epistemic opposition. The authors recast the conflict between COVID-19 skeptics and public health advocates as the rhetorical incompatibility between the deliberative, scientifically grounded public health experts and the intuitive, emotion-driven mental heuristics of the non-compliant. This study examines the discourse of COVID-19 misinformation purveyors on broadcast media and online. Their main contentions rely on heuristics and biases that collectively not only undermine trust in particular medical experts, but also undercut trust in the institutions and reasoning processes of science itself. The findings suggest ways that public health campaigns can become more effective by leveraging some of the intuitive drivers of attitudes and behaviors that scientists and argumentation theorists routinely dismiss as fallacious.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Trumping Reason

  Advances in linguistics and communication studies · 2021-06-04 · 3 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Why does support for Donald Trump remain resilient despite the preponderance of arguments and evidence that should refute so many of his claims? The answer lies in how Trump's rhetoric fully embraces intuitively based rationales for allegiance. This chapter analyzes Donald Trump's rhetoric throughout his campaign and presidency through the lens of moral foundations theory, which identifies clusters of value commitments that correlate with political allegiance. Trump activates connections with foundational values of his constituents through specific heuristic devices, especially loss aversion, availability, and representativeness. Synthesizing behavioral economics with the dramatistic rhetorical theories of Kenneth Burke reveals how Trump's claims resist counterargument and what rhetorical resources offer potential avenues for alternative positions to gain traction.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jenni M. Simon

  University of North Carolina at Greensboro

  5 shared

• Karen Boger

  3 shared

• David Carlone

  3 shared

• Karen Wilson

  2 shared

• Kelly Bouas Henry

  Missouri Western State University

  2 shared

• Wuhan Zhu

  1 shared

• Kimberly M. Cuny

  University of North Carolina at Greensboro

  1 shared

• Omar Swartz

  University of Colorado Denver

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Communication Studies

  The University of Iowa

  1994

• M.A., Speech Communication

  University of Georgia

  1984

• A.B., Philosophy

  University of Georgia

  1982

Awards & honors

• Joyce Ferguson Award for Top Faculty Paper, National Associa…
• National Communication Association Presidential Citation for…
• Global Citizenship Foundation World’s 100 Leading Thinkers i…
• Top Applied Learning Panel, Conference on Applied Learning i…
• Chancellor's Resident Fellow, Lloyd International Honors Col…