Renu Pariyadath, Ph.D.

Teacher-Scholar and Culture Builder

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    about

    I’m an Assistant Professor of Communication at University of South Carolina Upstate. I study strategic organizing around issues of development in the Global South and environmental justice, especially in the context of transnational resistance to global restructuring. My scholarship engages critical cultural studies, environmental communication and non-profit organizational communication, and borrows widely from transnational feminist theory, and sociological and anthropological scholarship on transnationalism. I teach environmental communication, communication for social change, ethics in human communication, organizational communication, and gender and communication. I received my doctorate in communication studies from the University of Iowa with a graduate minor in gender, women’s and sexuality studies, and have a master’s degree in communication from The Ohio State University. I am actively involved in environmental justice movements in the U.S. and in India and was previously an international working journalist.

    Non-Identity-based Community

    Harnessing Liminality and Nonduality

    I applied to grad school in the US to study about identity. I didn’t quite know what I meant by that but study identity I did. Grad coursework in the communication studies and Women, gender and sexuality studies departments at University of Iowa blew my mind. In particular, transnational feminist theory and Queer theory upended my understanding of time, space, and how bodies are made and re-made for heteronormative, colonial, and imperialist projects.

    By the end of my PhD, however, I felt emotionally drained by the ways in which DEI and sustainability were being invoked within and outside the academy. Sustainability was often merely performative while the performativity of identity wasn’t stressed enough. Identity was being deployed to call out and cancel and my interest was in building community, not dismantling them. 

    Transnational feminist and queer theory frameworks still have my heart. My work has focused on processes and frameworks that force one to inhabit liminality, calling into question the stability of the self and other, moving both the self and other towards the middle, the nondual.

    I’ve explored how communication can help people move beyond stereotypes and connect across cultural difference, and examined pedagogical strategies for bridging the global and the local in classroom settings. I have written about the transformative potential of questioning spaces that we find comfortable and call home. Inhabiting discomfort allows for liminal spaces where assumptions loosen and deeper connection becomes possible.

    Currently, my undergraduates and I are exploring how neuronormative communication is constructed and reinforced in the public speaking classroom. My Advanced Public Speaking course is using the Neurodiversity Paradigm (Walker, 2021) and encounters with speaking and non-speaking neurodivergent individuals to build a framework that questions and dismantles constructions of the normative speaker and communicator.

    Since March 2020, I’ve maintained a daily sitting meditation and contemplative practice, which grounds both my teaching and research. I am a certified Compassion-Based Resilience Training (CBRT) trainer, and strive to bring mindfulness, compassion, and embodied awareness off the cushion and into my work with students and colleagues.