"I see that in people in poverty situations, they are unheard and unrecognized, as well as un-understood. Those are things that better communication can address." Dr. Mark Leeman (Ph.D. 2007)

Mark Leeman graduated from COMS with his Ph.D. in 2007.  After graduation Mark moved to Cincinnati where he and his family created a non-profit organization called the Walnut Hills Activist Development.  Mark's non-profit works in conjunction with four other non-profits in the community to help build social capital in the Walnut Hills neighborhood.  Mark is now an Assistant Professor at Northern Kentucky University.

Q: your background was in Linguistics, what led you to study communication?

I took one graduate class in COMS when I did my MA in Linguistics at OU. It was Cross Cultural Com and I found it to be a great macro view of managing meaning, rather than focusing down so hard on the structure of language. What I do now is really sociolinguistics, a language/discourse centered look at social phenomena. Human organizing is largely a language act, and in Communication Studies I can focus on the meanings that seem to really matter in people’s lives.

Q: What was the main focus of your work while in COMS? (i.e., what was your primary and secondary areas, etc?). 

My primary area was organizational communication and my secondary was culture and social change. 

Q: Can you talk about how your interests in those topics led you to your dissertation?

If communication is the managing of meaning across difference, then in my view if you want to make a better, more humanizing world for everyone you’ve got to understand how that difference effects the sense-making of those who are at the short end of the power stick. I am motivated to help those in poverty who want to work to find on-ramps back into the competitive (and middle-class dominated) world of work, and to help them survive and succeed there. We’ve got to make our system of capitalism work for everyone, and folks in poverty have huge language, discourse, and cultural barriers to scale if they are to get, keep, and prosper at work. That is a communication problem, and it is an organizing problem. Those are the things I study and address. 

Q: If you did not already answer this question, can you briefly describe your dissertation project?

I worked with Good Works, Inc., to help homeless people find jobs with bosses who were willing to enter into a narrative-and-dialogue-based employment relationships more suitable for success for someone working out of the horrors of poverty and a homeless shelter. Changing some of the basic rules for how work is communicated seemed to make a big difference to the success of our participants, and I learned a lot about communication between middle-class bosses and poverty-class employees at and around work.

Q: After graduating, you went back to doing NGO work. Can you talk a little about your organization?

In inner-city Cincinnati I do much of the same work, but with a new language/cultural group. Race added to the divide of difference between the middle-class and those in poverty adds another layer of complexity. It’s another language of discourse that I am in the midst of learning. I have also added a lot of activism around affordable housing in an effort to holistically serve and learn with our friends in poverty in the ‘hood. We are working with other neighborhood groups to try to build a diverse community where we can all learn, grow, and serve one another. Where I teach, in Northern Kentucky, right over the river from Cincinnati, there is also a lot of Appalachian poverty to be learned from.

Q: What led you to get involved in this kind of work? What motivates you to want to do this?

Both my parents were raised in poverty and I was faced with a lot of it growing up in a “rusty” steel city. Then I was around a lot of oppression in Eastern Europe and economic hardship in Appalachia during my 2 stints in Athens (for my Masters and then the PhD). Bakhtin posited that Absolute Death was to be unheard and unrecognized. I see that in people in poverty situations, they are unheard and unrecognized, as well as un-understood. Those are things that better communication can address, so who better to get involved than Communication scholars and Communication-sensitive activists? In a Bakhtinian way we can bring life where there is “absolute death.” I want to do that.

Q: How do you think your work in NGOs now positions you to become an Assistant Professor at NKU?

My activism and my scholarship and my teaching have coalesced for me in a beautiful way. I have received a world-class education from living overseas and being around so many people living in the crises of poverties that I can hardly imagine. Around that I have been given the gifts of language-centered training in linguistics and a fabulous doctoral program in communication from people like Lynn Harter. Lynn and others have given me a theoretical sensitivity through which to make sense of complex communication contexts, along with the soul and desire to help create a freer, more just world for all communicators. From where I sit that has set me up perfectly to work at a school like NKU that takes community involvement on as the fourth rail of the academy, along with teaching, research, and service. I’m living the dream here!