Joshua Barbour

I am a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In 2018, I founded the Automation Policy and Research Organizing Network (APRON), which aims to build a community of scholars, practitioners, and policymakers and advance communication research focused on the future of data-intensive, automated work, and I direct the APRON Lab.

My research begins with the assumption that institutional structures such as regulations, laws, and cultural norms create opportunities, constraints, resources, and contradictions that we exploit and suffer to solve problems. I try to shed light on practitioners’ strategic efforts to navigate those structures. I study their communication design: the choices actors make about messages, communication tools, formats, and systems of interaction to do so. I also study the institutional moorings of communication and organizing, or put another way, I view organizational communication as macromorphic. Across my scholarship, I have found that (a) institutional constraints can be overcome and reconstructed by local actors’ macromorphic communicative and organizational efforts, (b) these efforts are captured in and enacted through their choices about communication, (c) these choices vary in rhetorical and strategic sophistication, and (d) success depends on the creativity with which they can recast communicative situations, negotiate competing ideals for practice, and navigate contradictory frameworks for action.