Bio
Don Waisanen is an assistant professor of communication in the Baruch College School of Public Affairs, where he teaches courses in political communication and public advocacy. His research focuses on rhetoric and public affairs—especially irony, satire, and parody in public culture, and the intersections of deliberative democracy, social movements, and civic identities. He has published on a diverse range of topics exploring the forms of public discourse most amenable to democratic communication and community, from the critical humor of the Onion News Network to populist reasoning in immigration activism. Current projects involve transnational media campaigns, comedic contributions to civil society, church-state controversies, argumentation on social networking sites, and political conversion narratives.
Before entering academia, Don was a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs, and worked in broadcast journalism, as a speechwriter, and on various political campaigns. This year he will be working as a Rubin Fellow at Baruch College, exploring the arts and culture sector in New York City and the possibilities for cosmopolitan communication in globalizing contexts. Don serves on the board of the Resilience Advocacy Project, a nonprofit promoting local and system-level efforts to help youth transition out of poverty and into adulthood. He contributes to Thick Culture—a blog formed by an interdisciplinary group of scholars—and has long enjoyed and been informed in his professional work by involvement in the performing arts, particularly satirical activism and improvisational comedy. He received a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Southern California.