Area of Specialization: Culture

My own culturally hybrid experience, research and training leadership in intercultural immersion, and experience living abroad in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and the South Pacific help fuel the questions I am concerned with, which include:
•      How are cultural perceptions reproduced and resisted through communication?
•      How is cultural difference constructed and transgressed through communication?
•      How do cultural technologies work to construct and discipline self and society?
•      How is the self transformed through culture and communication?

Recent and Current Work:

Current ecocultural work has me focused on dominant Western environmental discourses, as well as marginalized minority environmental meaning systems. Other ongoing research focuses on the Middle East, ethnographically examining Israeli officials' discursive construction of "normalcy" during heightened conflict, as well as textually analyzing competing collective identities and transformative meanings in Israeli and Palestinian press. Additional ongoing work looks at intercultural immersion as it relates to perceived self transformation in the form of self-efficacy. Recent research focused on how new media technologies serve both as a tool for organizing public commons and for surveilling private lives.

Sample Publications:
•      Peterson, J., Milstein, T., Chen, Y.W., & Nakazawa, M. (2011). Self-efficacy in communication: The development and validation of a sojourners’ scale. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication. 4 (4), 290-309.
•      Milstein, T., & Manusov, V. (2009). Oppositional discourse in Israeli media: Reflections of multiple cultural identities in coverage of the Rabin-Arafat handshake. Howard Journal of Communications. 20 (4), 353-369.
•      Milstein, T. (2005). Transformation Abroad: Sojourning and the Perceived Enhancement of Self-Efficacy International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 29 (2), 217-238.
•      Manusov, V., & Milstein, T. (2005). Interpreting Nonverbal Behavior: Representation and Transformation Frames in Israeli and Palestinian Media Coverage of the 1993 Rabin-Arafat Handshake Western Journal of Communication, 69 (3), 183-201.
•      Howard, P., Carr, J., & Milstein, T. (2005).  Digital Technology and the Market for Political Surveillance. Surveillance & Society, 3(1), 59-73.
•      Howard, P., & Milstein, T. (2004). Spiders, Spam, and Spyware: New Media and the Market for Political Information.  In Mia Consalvo (Ed.) Internet Research Annual: Selected Papers from the Association of Internet Researchers Conference.  2000-2002, vol. 1. Peter Lang.