Introduction: possibilities of collaboration between public memory scholars and higher education public relations professionals

ABSTRACT

This is the second part of a two-part forum called Interventions in Public Memory: Interrogating the Critical/Cultural Landscape of Higher Education, edited by Meredith M. Bagley. In this introduction, I explore the ways public memory scholars and higher education public relations professionals can collaborate to enhance critical/cultural approaches to institutional public memory on campuses. As we face this important moment for public memory on US campuses, common concerns for politics, place, dialectic tension, and repair that animate both public memory and public relations call for collaboration between these groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Public relations
• public memory
• rhetoric
• colleges and universities
• critical/cultural studies

History may judge this decade as a turning point for university campuses and public memory. As Meredith Bagley observed in the introduction to the first set of essays in this two-part forum, US campuses are evaluating their public memory landscapes with urgency in light of the racial reckoning of 2020.¹ For many institutions, this evaluation means the de-naming and re-naming of campus buildings as today’s constituents grapple over the values of faculty, alumni, donors, or administrators honored in the past.² A campus may join institutions that have acknowledged the presence of enslaved people on campus through public apologies or the addition of campus memorials.³ These overlaps between colleges and surrounding communities – what historian Tiya Miles refers to as “the imbrication of campus and society”⁴ – present opportunities for critical/cultural scholars of public memory.

Indeed, this second set of forum essays hums with activity: collaboration, countering, repairing, remembering, recovering, and praxis. The title for this second forum, “Memory Work as Leaning In and Stepping Out,” references the visceral, emotional, often risky processes of doing memory work at our own workplaces and in our own communities.⁵ My fellow contributors give tours, construct resistive syllabi, serve on task forces, engage adjacent communities erased by gentrification and whiteness, reckon with settler colonialism, and bring racial reckoning to their everyday decisions. For my part, I pose a question rooted in my own positionality as a former college public relations director who now studies public relations activism and public memory from a critical/rhetorical perspective: can collaboration between public memory scholars and higher education public relations professionals enhance critical/cultural approaches to institutional public memory on campuses?

Let me explain. On many college campuses, faculty and staff operate in silos, which can limit or prevent collaboration.⁶ Additionally, academics outside of public relations scholarship may have a limited perception of the discipline’s critical tradition and its robust emphasis on ethical practice.⁷ Indeed, the title of an article by Coy Callison et al. – “Smart Friendly Liars” – encapsulates a durable perception of public relations practitioners.⁸ Finally, public relations practitioners on college campuses are responsible for the promotion and protection of the college brand. The role includes maintaining awareness of how the organization is perceived within a competitive environment for admissions and donor funding – a rankings-conscious position, with an eye toward proactive reputation management.⁹ These emphases of higher education public relations staff, and the attendant allegiance to institutional concerns, may seem incompatible with the “radical interrogation” of power relations, oppositional engagement, and activistic aims of critical/cultural studies faculty.¹⁰

Yet public relations scholarship and practice has much to offer, I argue, to what Barbie Zelizer calls the project of “sharing, discussion, negotiation, and often contestation”¹¹ involved in the construction of public memory on college campuses. For example, a major strain of public relations theory examines the ways public relations can and does contribute to society. Robert Heath, one of the discipline’s most influential scholars, identified this turn in the research literature “from making organizations effective to making society effective.” ¹² Among his contributions, Heath forwarded a rhetorical enactment approach to public relations that values “co-management, co-definition and co-creation” through two-way symmetrical communication and dialogue. The ideal result, to borrow from Quintilian, is “the good organization speaking well.”¹³ Similarly, a core element of Heath’s Fully Functioning Society Theory emphasizes communitas – the building of open, trustworthy, and collaborative relationships – in contrast to corporatas.¹⁴ Such an emphasis requires public relations to view itself as “a force (through reflective research and best practices) to foster community as blended relationships, resource distribution, and shared meanings that advance and yield to enlightened choice.”¹⁵ This view of public relations is compatible with the values of collaboration, collegiality, and shared decision-making that ideally characterize shared governance within the academy.¹⁶ While this perspective represents a normative approach to the ethical practice of public relations, I would be remiss not to acknowledge the ways public relations has been used as a tool of the state and to advance neoliberal logics. This limitation standing, in several instances I find that a robust view of strategic communication on campus empowers college and university public relations practitioners – who often bring a boundary-spanning perspective – to contribute to the process of building community across divisions, departments, and constituencies that include students, faculty, staff, alumni, donors, and local community members, and to consider the nimbus publics that may form as a result of controversy.

In conjunction with the turn toward societal benefit, the variety of approaches and ethical stances represented within the discipline potentially offer a multiplicity of benefits within the physically and ideologically contested spaces of higher education and public memory. In her overview of public relations research, Johanna Fawkes identified four key schools of thought within the discipline: (1) the excellence paradigm; (2) the advocacy perspective; (3) the dialogic perspective; and (4) critical and cultural perspectives.¹⁷ While each of these frameworks prioritizes important considerations, the critical/cultural perspective that has emerged over the last three decades is of particular benefit to higher education practitioners because it challenges us to engage our work reflexively¹⁸ and to interrogate our idealized assumptions about that work. ¹⁹ Working in institutions that seek to serve a public good does not absolve us of the challenge to do good work in good ways. Historians like Jacquie L’Etang remind us to “see public relations as part of the political, economic, and socio-cultural fabric, rather than ideologically neutral technocracy;”²⁰ while postmodern scholars like Derina Holtzhausen urge our discipline to grapple with our participation in capitalism, to reimagine ourselves as internal activists, and, when it comes to social and cultural debates, to “choose which side [we] are on.”²¹

It's possible that my review of the emergence of critical/cultural orientations in public relations scholarship is surprising to readers of our forum; I’d like to push one step further to suggest that these orientations provide a foundation for the type of collaborative participation necessary to negotiate the chasm between what Matthew Houdek and Kendall R. Philips identify as the “informal, diverse, and mutable” nature of public memory, and the “formal, singular, and stable” presentation of history.²² In the higher education setting, public relations practitioners can lead and partner in the task of listening to and resolving perceived fissures between the concerns of the institution and its multiple stakeholder groups. Such negotiations and dialogues are part of the ordinary work of practitioners in these spaces, and can contribute to the process of creating, sharing, and circulating public memory.

The fruitful collaborations I raise for consideration will require public memory scholars and public relations staff to navigate the divide between faculty and staff that often exists as employees who work at the same institution but experience different responsibilities, reporting structures, time frames, and relationships to administration. The literature on the “faculty–staff divide” within higher education is compelling. For example, Bela Florenthal et al. identified several sources of staff–faculty tension, including “perceived differences over roles, responsibilities, or organizational goals, coupled with a lack of respect for nonteaching staff;”²³ Nancy T. Watson et al. argued that “conflict in higher education has some unique attributes due to the prevailing expectations, climate, and culture,” including the independent nature of much faculty work and the prominence of debate (rather than dialogue) as a mode of communication.²⁴ Adopting a term from management consultant Jennifer Kemeny, Susan Christy claimed that these differences can result in faculty and staff becoming “accidental adversaries” – groups that would benefit from partnership, but instead end up at odds.²⁵ Stratification and diminished organizational effectiveness can result.²⁶ This sense of stratification, which can be reflected in different policies for faculty and staff,²⁷ should concern justice-minded critical/cultural scholars; collaboration will require us to interrogate the systems we participate in and benefit from and to recognize the intellectual labor of colleagues outside of the classroom. For public relations staff, collaboration requires patiently educating our colleagues about the strategic nature of our work²⁸ and initiating them into our domain – the management of reputational crises that occur when past wrongs come to light.²⁹ For both groups, collaborating across the divide requires forthright communication about the differing priorities of the professions and guilds to which we belong, and acknowledgment that our best advice will always be balanced against institutional priorities. In these ways, we enter partnerships with a realistic sense of what we can accomplish; we also model healthy dialogic processes for our students, many of whom will navigate similar conflicts in their lives of work and service.

As someone with a foot in both camps, I see the possibility for collaborative campus public memory work to be an expression of what Stephen John Harnett calls “joyful commitment” as we use our communication scholarship and skills for justice.³⁰ This view is not based merely on an emergent scholar’s optimism; it is also rooted in the shared concerns of both groups. For example, in addition to operating with understandings of the role of publics in society (however differently they may define them), both groups are aware of the inherently political nature of public memory as “the product of ongoing social or political debate over the contested meaning of the past.”³¹ This means that both faculty and staff contribute understandings of the stakes and dynamics in play. The two groups also share a concern for place. For example, Carol Blair, Brian Ott, and Greg Dickinson argue for a view of place as rhetorical and affective in nature.³² Public relations practitioners at colleges and universities often address these qualities through the lens of “town–gown” relationships, wanting our campuses to be good neighbors to our local communities.³³ They are conscious, though perhaps in different ways, of the role of campus buildings and campus layout in creating a sense of identity and belonging,³⁴ and they recognize that students’ experiences affect their relationships with their colleges over a lifetime. Thirdly, public memory scholars and public relations practitioners see the importance of dialectic tension related to memory and forgetting.³⁵ College campuses are particularly visible as places where different stakeholders offer opposing perspectives on the memory-forgetting dialectic (and whether this term accurately describes the issues at stake) in real time. For example, Shari Veil and Damion Waymer’s case study of a crisis situation over historical artwork at the University of Kentucky illustrates the complexity of engaging competing voices – and examines how the term “erasure” can encompass realities as starkly different as mutilation, repurposing, reputation management, issues management, activism, empowerment, and even reconciliation. ³⁶

Finally, public memory scholars and public relations practitioners share a concern for repair. For example, Shevaun E. Watson argues for the centrality of public memory as a means of repairing what she describes as the “flawed and freighted” past of the US.³⁷ This is also true for our colleges and universities, which Robert Heath and Damion Waymer contend have the potential to offer leadership on race and other social issues through their corporate social responsibility efforts.³⁸ Public relations scholars including Claudia I. Janssen, who developed the concept of corporate historical responsibility, cautioned that the tactics of corporate apologia and image repair that can be effective in typical crises are insufficient for situations of historical wrongdoing. Instead, organizations should respect the memories and identities of those victimized or otherwise affected by their previous actions; demonstrate a remorseful attitude and expression of regret for harm caused; cultivate a posture of accountability and answerability that is open to dialogue about the organization’s actions; and commit to justice in the present and the prevention of future injustice.³⁹ As we face this important moment for public memory on campus, these principles – and the concerns for politics, place, dialectic tension, and repair that animate both public memory and public relations – call for collaboration between these groups.

The articles in this forum were selected based on exploring public engagement and dissent regarding “memory work” in or near college campuses. In each essay, we hear tensions of creativity and constraint, intervention and re-entrenchment, and we can glean insight and inspiration for this work on our own campuses. Meredith Bagley considers counter-memory tours as a mechanism to “resuscitate” the memory of the first Black students at The University of Alabama, while Allison Dziuba introduces “countercurricular” education as a way for students to hold institutions accountable. Brandon Inabinet joins Dziuba in an intention for repair and resistance by reflecting on his experience serving on a campus task force aimed at repairing harms of slavery on a Southern campus. Place is actively, insistently, present in the work of Ashley Cordes, who calls our attention to paltry and harmful land acknowledgement statements that fail to account for settler colonial influences across higher education. Victoria Gallagher and Max Renner’s account of their ongoing work with the Virtual MLK project, as a transmedia act of recovery in Durham, NC, offers a consideration of how to recover history in and alongside community. In the concluding essay of the forum, Patricia Davis urges us to look to the “memory politics of everyday life” for ways we can mobilize resistance and enhance our critical engagement via everyday integration of Black voices and perspectives. The essays selected for this special forum take up aspects of the challenges of collaboration – what Bagley calls “Memory Work as Leaning In and Stepping Out.” In the pages that follow we hear about recovery, reimagining, repairing and resuscitating; about countering, collaborating, and crafting. My hope is that my introduction expresses a shared interest in more, and more creatively imagined, collaborations among scholars, practitioners, teachers, and students on our campus and community landscapes.

Notes

1 Meredith M. Bagley, “Introduction: Interrogating the Memory Landscape of Higher Education,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, February 5, 2023, 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2023.2169314.

2 Laura Spitalniak, “Colleges Seek Better Ways to Rename Buildings,” Higher Ed Dive, March 22, 2022, https://www.highereddive.com/news/colleges-seek-better-ways-to-rename-buildings/620725/.

3 Nick Anderson and Susan Svrluga, “From Slavery to Jim Crow to George Floyd: Virginia Universities Face a Long Racial Reckoning,” Washington Post, December 2, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/11/26/virginia-universities-slavery-race-reckoning/; Deborah Barfield Berry, “The US Is Grappling with Its History of Slavery. The Blueprint for Dealing with It? Some Say Brown University,” USA Today, December 17, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/education/2019/12/16/slavery-reparations-brown-university-antigua-colleges-paying-up/4401725002/; Gilbert Cruz, “UA Apologizes for History of Slavery,” The Tuscaloosa News, April 20, 2004, https://www.tuscaloosanews.com/story/news/2004/04/21/ua-apologizes-for-history-of-slavery/27863767007/; Joe Heim, “St. Mary’s College of Maryland Unveils Memorial to Enslaved People on Its Campus,” Washington Post, November 22, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/st-marys-college-memorial-enslaved-southern-maryland/2020/11/20/a9f57460-2b41-11eb-8fa2-06e7cbb145c0_story.html; Holland Cotter, “Turning Grief for a Hidden Past Into a Healing Space,” The New York Times, August 26, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/16/arts/design/university-of-virginia-enslaved-laborers-memorial.html; Martha Waggoner, “UNC Leader Apologizes for School’s History of Slavery,” WLOS, October 13, 2018, https://wlos.com/news/local/unc-leader-apologizes-for-schools-history-of-slavery-10-13-2018.

4 Tiya Miles, “Campus Meets World,” The Public Historian 42, no. 4 (October 23, 2020): 10, https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2020.42.4.9.

5 Guest editor Bagley chose to title this forum with “memory work” centering a material, interventionist, activist focus, aligned with the legacy of critical pedagogies and engaged scholarship. For a different use of this phrase, see Bradford Vivian’s chapter on “memory work” in the context of the repetitive and “nomadic” process of remembering and forgetting, or the “ritualized making and remaking of memory” particular to cultural groups or communities (p.189). Bradford Vivian. “Memory and Repetition,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. K. Phillips (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004). 187–211.

6 Jennifer L.S. Syno, Juliann Sergi McBrayer, and Daniel W. Calhoun, “Faculty and Staff Perceptions of Organizational Units and Collaboration Impact,” College Student Affairs Journal 37, no. 1 (2019): 1–13, https://doi.org/10.1353/csj.2019.0000.

7 Johanna Fawkes, “The Evolution of Public Relations Research – an Overview,” Communication & Society, 2018, 159–69, https://doi.org/10.15581/003.31.4.159-169.

8 Coy Callison, Patrick F. Merle, and Trent Seltzer, “Smart Friendly Liars: Public Perception of Public Relations Practitioners over Time,” Public Relations Review 40, no. 5 (December 2014): 829–31, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2014.09.003.

9 Paul Temple, “Branding Higher Education: Illusion or Reality?,” Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education 10, no. 1 (January 2006): 15–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/13603100500508215.; Damion Waymer and Sarah VanSlette, “Higher Education Public Relations and Branding: Critically Interrogating Universities’ Rankings and AAU Aspirational Pursuits,” Journal of School Public Relations 37, no. 2 (April 1, 2016): 227–48, https://doi.org/10.3138/jspr.37.2.227; David L. Bunzel, “Universities Sell Their Brands,” Journal of Product & Brand Management 16, no. 2 (April 24, 2007): 152–53, https://doi.org/10.1108/10610420710740034; Amber L. Stephenson, Alex Heckert, and David B. Yerger, “College Choice and the University Brand: Exploring the Consumer Decision Framework,” Higher Education 71, no. 4 (April 2016): 489–503, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-015-9919-1; Robert A. Sevier, “Brand as Relevance,” Journal of Marketing for Higher Education 10, no. 3 (May 22, 2001): 77–97, https://doi.org/10.1300/J050v10n03_05; Amber L. Stephenson and Nikki Bell, “Motivation for Alumni Donations: A Social Identity Perspective on the Role of Branding in Higher Education: A Social Identity Perspective on Alumni Giving,” International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing 19, no. 3 (August 2014): 176–86, https://doi.org/10.1002/nvsm.1495.

10 Neil Badmington et al., eds., “Editors’ Introduction,” in The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), 3; Kent A. Ono, “Critical: A Finer Edge,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (March 2011): 93–96, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2011.543332; and Christian Fuchs, Foundations of Critical Theory: Media, Communication and Society Volume Two, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2021), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003199182.

11 Barbie Zelizer, “Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12, no. 2 (1995): 214.

12 Robert L. Heath, “Preface,” in The SAGE Handbook of Public Relations, vol. 2 (SAGE Publications, Inc., 2010), xiii.

13 Robert L. Heath, “A Rhetorical Enactment Rationale for Public Relations: The Good Organization Communicating Well,” in Handbook of Public Relations, by Robert Heath (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2001), 6,14, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452220727.n2.

14 Robert L. Heath, “Onward into More Fog: Thoughts on Public Relations’ Research Directions,” Journal of Public Relations Research 18, no. 2 (April 2006): 93–114, https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532754xjprr1802_2.

15 Heath, “Onward into More Fog,” 97.

16 Matthew A. Crellin, “The Future of Shared Governance,” New Directions for Higher Education 2010, no. 151 (September 24, 2010): 71–81, https://doi.org/10.1002/he.402. It is important to acknowledge that these terms, and the similar idea of “civility,” can be used to marginalize dissent. For example, see Kristiana L. Báez and Ersula Ore, “The Moral Imperative of Race for Rhetorical Studies: On Civility and Walking-in-White in Academe,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (October 2, 2018): 331–36, https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2018.1533989; Kakali Bhattacharya, “Civility as Absurdity: Absurdity as Civility in Higher Education,” in Civility, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in Higher Education, ed. Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt and Kakali Bhattacharya, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 2021), 163–78, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429282041-15; Tracey Owens Patton, “In the Guise of Civility: The Complicitous Maintenance of Inferential Forms of Sexism and Racism in Higher Education,” Women’s Studies in Communication 27, no. 1 (2004): 60–87.

17 Fawkes, “The Evolution of Public Relations Research.”

18 Paul Willis, “From Knowing to Doing: Reflexivity, Leadership and Public Relations,” Public Relations Review 45, no. 3 (September 2019): 101780, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2019.05.001.

19 See Jacquie L’Etang, “The Myth of the ‘Ethical Guardian’: An Examination of Its Origins, Potency and Illusions,” Journal of Communication Management 8, no. 1 (January 1, 2004): 53–67, https://doi.org/10.1108/13632540410807547, and Marianne D. Sison, “Recasting Public Relations Roles: Agents of Compliance, Control or Conscience,” Journal of Communication Management 14, no. 4 (November 16, 2010): 319–36, https://doi.org/10.1108/13632541011090437.

20 Jacquie L’Etang, “Public Relations: A Discipline in Transformation,” Sociology Compass 7, no. 10 (October 2013): 803, https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12072.

21 Derina R. Holtzhausen, “Postmodern Values in Public Relations,” Journal of Public Relations Research 12, no. 1 (January 2000): 110, https://doi.org/10.1207/S1532754XJPRR1201_6.

22 “Public Memory.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Oxford University Press, January 25, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.181.

23 Bela Florenthal and Yulia Tolstikov-Mast, “Organizational Culture: Comparing Faculty and Staff Perspectives,” Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice 12, no. 6 (2012): 82.

24 Nancy T. Watson et al., “Integrating Social Justice-Based Conflict Resolution into Higher Education Settings: Faculty, Staff, and Student Professional Development through Mediation Training,” Conflict Resolution Quarterly 36, no. 3 (March 2019): 252, https://doi.org/10.1002/crq.21233; Nancy T. Watson, Karan L. Watson, and Christine A. Stanley, Conflict Management and Dialogue in Higher Education: A Global Perspective, 2nd ed., International Higher Education (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc, 2018).

25 Jennifer Kemeny, “‘Accidental Adversaries’: When Friends Become Foes,” The Systems Thinker 5, no. 1 (1994): 5–6; Susan Christy, Working Effectively with Faculty: Guidebook for Higher Education Staff and Managers (Berkeley, CA: University Resources Press, 2010), 64.

26 For a first-person perspective, see Natalie Henderson, “A ‘Nonacademic’ Career in Academe,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 20, 2005, https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-nonacademic-career-in-academe/.

27 Jeffrey Selingo, “Colleges Are Deeply Unequal Workplaces,” The Atlantic, August 1, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/colleges-are-deeply-unequal-workplaces/614791/.

28 Charlie Melichar and Joseph A. Brennan, “The Future of Higher Ed PR,” Inside Higher Ed, July 11, 2017, https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/call-action-marketing-and-communications-higher-education/future-higher-ed-pr.

29 Elizabeth Carnegie and Simon Woodward, “Negotiating Problematic Identities of Place within the Path-Driven Elite University: Jefferson, Slavery and the University of Virginia,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 28, no. 6 (June 3, 2022): 684–98, https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2022.2061572; Claudia I. Janssen, “Addressing Corporate Ties to Slavery: Corporate Apologia in a Discourse of Reconciliation,” Communication Studies 63, no. 1 (January 2012): 18–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2011.627974; and Shari R. Veil and Damion Waymer, “Crisis Narrative and the Paradox of Erasure: Making Room for Dialectic Tension in a Cancel Culture,” Public Relations Review 47, no. 3 (September 2021): 102046, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2021.102046

30 Stephen John Hartnett, “Communication, Social Justice, and Joyful Commitment,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 1 (January 2010): 68–93, https://doi.org/10.1080/10570310903463778.

31 Bradford Vivian, Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 12.

32 Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott, “Introduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, ed. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 1–54, 14.

33 “Strategies to Build Town–Gown Relations,” University Business, May 23, 2014, https://universitybusiness.com/strategies-to-build-town-gown-relations/; Joe Harasta, “Town & Gown: University and Community Leaders’ Perceptions on Mutually Beneficial Relationships: An Urban American University Case Study,” Athens Journal of Mass Media and Communications 8, no. 3 (February 4, 2022): 161–78, https://doi.org/10.30958/ajmmc.8-3-2; Stephen D. Bruning, Shea McGrew, and Mark Cooper, “Town–Gown Relationships: Exploring University–Community Engagement from the Perspective of Community Members,” Public Relations Review 32, no. 2 (June 2006): 125–30, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2006.02.005.

34 Blair, Dickinson, and Ott, “Introduction.”

35 Blair, Dickinson and Ott, “Introduction;” and Veil and Waymer, “Crisis Narrative.”

36 Veil and Waymer, “Crisis Narrative,” p. 8.

37 Shevaun E. Watson, “Memory and Heritage in the ‘Era of Just Redemption,’” in Public Memory, Race, and Heritage Tourism of Early America, ed. Cathy Rex and Shevaun E. Watson, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2021), 154, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003102830.

38 See Robert L. Heath and Damion Waymer, “Corporate Social Responsibility: US Colleges and Universities as Agents of Change on Race,” in The 5th International CSR Communication Conference (CSR Communication Conference 2019, Stockholm School of Economics, 2019), 214–24, http://csr-com.org/img/upload/final_CSRCOMproceedings2019_web.pdf#page=215; and “University Engagement for Enlightening CSR: Serving Hegemony or Seeking Constructive Change,” Public Relations Review 47, no. 1 (March 2021): 1–9, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2020.101958.

39 Claudia I. Janssen, “Corporate Historical Responsibility (CHR): Addressing a Corporate Past of Forced Labor at Volkswagen,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 41, no. 1 (February 2013): 64–83, https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2012.731698.