Jennifer Borda

Jennifer L. Borda is Professor of Communication, specializing in rhetoric, feminist studies, civil discourse and democratic deliberation. She is author of Women Labor Activists in the Movies: Nine Depictions of Workplace Organizers, 1954-2005 (McFarland Publishers, 2010) and co-editor of The Motherhood Business: Consumption, Communication, and Privilege (University of Alabama Press, 2015). Her essays have been published in various academic journals and anthologies, including Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, the Journal of Deliberative Democracy, Communication Monographs, Feminist Media Studies, and The Routledge Companion to Motherhood, among others. She is Co-founder/Co-Director of the UNH Civil Discourse Lab (CDL), which is committed to non-partisanship and a focus on process rather than product or content. The CDL trains students to become neutral facilitators of challenging and contentious discussions, using small groups to focus participants on fundamental differences, shared values, and listening to each other’s perspectives, in order to encourage greater understanding. In 2021, she was awarded the Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award for the UNH College of Liberal Arts. Borda also received a UNH Center for the Humanities fellowship in 2014 for her research focusing on how discourse and ideologies about women, work, motherhood, and identity have been constructed and challenged through the mass media and online deliberation. She has been a fellow on the NSF-funded ADVANCE IT grant “UNH Unbiased” in which she co-chaired a subcommittee to address career-life balance issues relating to the recruitment of women and underrepresented STEM faculty. She also has been a member of UNH’s President’s Commission on the Status of Women and the Grand Challenges Steering Committee. She has been an invited participant in the Kettering Foundation Initiatives in Democratic Practices Learning Exchange and the SNF Ithaca Initiative Leadership Summit and the SNF Ithaca National Student Dialogue.