Joëlle M Cruz
Biographic Data
| ID | 4078941 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joëlle M Cruz |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joëlle M |
| FAMILY NAME | Cruz |
| SIGNATURE | CRUZ J M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Kent State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6019-487X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 45 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
No-Organization
This essay explores anti-Blackness and how it structures knowledge production about Africa. It introduces “No-Organization” or the “it” as an invisible discursive frame that constructs the continent as a space devoid of Organization. I use No-Organization to reengage two scholarly approaches invested in decentering the West and addressing the erasure of Africa in Organization Studies. The first approach deconstructs Western-centric representation…
Quarantined across borders
Embodied transnationalism is characterized by intimate experiences of human-made political borders that define, limit, and restrict flows of the “Other.” In the Quarantined Across Borders collection, contributors from immigrant and diasporic backgrounds address the material and discursive differences in how they experience the pandemic in terms of a public health crisis and public policy response that intersects racialized gender, class, citizens…
Akua Ananse Is a “She”
In this essay, I channel Kweku Ananse, the trickster in West African tales. Extending upon this figure, I re-gender Kweku Ananse as Akua Ananse and offer “spider stories” to make sense of my transnational identities as a West African and French woman, who is a professor in US academe. I offer a conversation between Akua Ananse, my French-speaking grandmother figure Marie, and my professional self. My spider stories subvert usual categories of kno…
Mapping Interventions
Engaging organizational communication and rhetorical studies subfields, we develop a case for decolonial and Indigenous approaches that offer texture and depth. In the process, we flip the existing topographic “map” of the field and shift Eurocentric canons undergirding cultural and critical Communication Studies. Drawing on vignettes from our fieldworks, we argue for a decolonial critical intervention to affirm marginalized voices, experiences, …
Object
Drawing on autoethnography as a genre, this letter of disapplication to the discipline of organizational communication is organized around short poems. Speaking from my positionality as a brown foreign woman of Ivorian and French heritage, I walk the reader through my experience of the walkout at the 2019 National Communication Association Organizational Communication Division's Top Paper Panel. Weaving in recent and distant pasts, I claim that t…
Debunking Eurocentrism in Organizational Communication Theory
This article centers marginal organizational actors—the disenfranchised of the Global South—to remedy their theoretical erasure and disrupt the Anglo-American grand narrative of organizational communication. This task is urgent amidst discussions of decolonization and whiteness in the discipline. We reengage Western theory on liquidity, hereby conceptualized as shape-shifting and adaptive organizing, moving like a liquid at the margins. We draw o…
Introduction
The politics of pre-emption
Research on political homophobia in contemporary African nations tends to focus on the legal, political and social consequences of such homophobia. However, this work remains limited in its treatment of the rise of political homophobia and mobilisation against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights. This article redirects such research by concentrating on the indigenous origins of mobilisation against LGBT rights in Liberia. Focusin…
Brown Body of Knowledge
In this autoethnographic piece, I offer five short poems reading as a 'tale of erasure' in the academy. The poems document how my particular identities-Brown, immigrant, female, professor-came to bear during the negotiation of immigration status. This tale illuminates the particular intersection of these layered identities with institutional silencing processes. Beyond my immediate story, poetic prose helps to document experiences of silencing an…
The Ekwe Collective
While making clear that black femininity exists and is located in multiple spaces, this essay brings out the intellectual and cultural presence and voices of black women in both national and international feminist communities. We engage black feminist thought (BFT) by offering the example of our community—the Ekwe Collective—a sisterhood of six feminist scholar–activists and their daughters. This essay offers insights on how BFT translates to the…
Following traces
Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it brings forth a methodology of “traces” for organizational ethnography of the shadow, also understood as the realm of the repressed. Second, it highlights the emotional disconnect that organizational ethnographers encounter in traumatized communities and provides suggestions to bridge them. Design/methodology/approach The paper – drawing on autoethnography – incorporates the author’s fieldwor…
Dirty Work at the Intersections of Gender, Class, and Nation
This study explored how market women rework meanings of dirty work and gender, class, and nation in post-conflict Liberia. I used African feminist theory as a lens, which nuances a simplistic and Western-centered reading of market women's empowerment. In this study, the notion of empowerment is connected to the principle of negotiation or the ability to compromise and strategically capitalize on situations. The women used three main strategies to…
Memories of trauma and organizing
This study builds on social-constructionist approaches to organizational memory studies by exploring how traumatic memories reconstruct present-day organizing practices. Using African feminist ethnography, I explored how war memories shaped market women’s informal credit organizations called ‘susu groups’ in postconflict Liberia. Findings show that traumatic memories engender and sustain three organizing practices: idealization, amplification, an…
This Ain't Paris Sweetie
This autoethnography explores West African and French identity in the Southern United States. Seven short poems trace back a journey from West Africa and France to the American South and flesh out the contours of a transient and suspended self. A brown immigrant woman, my text reconstructs the embodied experience of racism and sexism in a small conservative community. Poetic prose helps to capture the elusive nature of a narrative, best expressed…
Memories of trauma and organizing
This study builds on social-constructionist approaches to organizational memory studies by exploring how traumatic memories reconstruct present-day organizing practices. Using African feminist ethnography, I explored how war memories shaped market women’s informal credit organizations called ‘susu groups’ in postconflict Liberia. Findings show that traumatic memories engender and sustain three organizing practices: idealization, amplification, an…
Debunking Eurocentrism in Organizational Communication Theory
This article centers marginal organizational actors—the disenfranchised of the Global South—to remedy their theoretical erasure and disrupt the Anglo-American grand narrative of organizational communication. This task is urgent amidst discussions of decolonization and whiteness in the discipline. We reengage Western theory on liquidity, hereby conceptualized as shape-shifting and adaptive organizing, moving like a liquid at the margins. We draw o…
The politics of pre-emption
Research on political homophobia in contemporary African nations tends to focus on the legal, political and social consequences of such homophobia. However, this work remains limited in its treatment of the rise of political homophobia and mobilisation against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights. This article redirects such research by concentrating on the indigenous origins of mobilisation against LGBT rights in Liberia. Focusin…
Dirty Work at the Intersections of Gender, Class, and Nation
This study explored how market women rework meanings of dirty work and gender, class, and nation in post-conflict Liberia. I used African feminist theory as a lens, which nuances a simplistic and Western-centered reading of market women's empowerment. In this study, the notion of empowerment is connected to the principle of negotiation or the ability to compromise and strategically capitalize on situations. The women used three main strategies to…
Introduction
This Ain't Paris Sweetie
This autoethnography explores West African and French identity in the Southern United States. Seven short poems trace back a journey from West Africa and France to the American South and flesh out the contours of a transient and suspended self. A brown immigrant woman, my text reconstructs the embodied experience of racism and sexism in a small conservative community. Poetic prose helps to capture the elusive nature of a narrative, best expressed…
No-Organization
This essay explores anti-Blackness and how it structures knowledge production about Africa. It introduces “No-Organization” or the “it” as an invisible discursive frame that constructs the continent as a space devoid of Organization. I use No-Organization to reengage two scholarly approaches invested in decentering the West and addressing the erasure of Africa in Organization Studies. The first approach deconstructs Western-centric representation…
Mapping Interventions
Engaging organizational communication and rhetorical studies subfields, we develop a case for decolonial and Indigenous approaches that offer texture and depth. In the process, we flip the existing topographic “map” of the field and shift Eurocentric canons undergirding cultural and critical Communication Studies. Drawing on vignettes from our fieldworks, we argue for a decolonial critical intervention to affirm marginalized voices, experiences, …
Brown Body of Knowledge
In this autoethnographic piece, I offer five short poems reading as a 'tale of erasure' in the academy. The poems document how my particular identities-Brown, immigrant, female, professor-came to bear during the negotiation of immigration status. This tale illuminates the particular intersection of these layered identities with institutional silencing processes. Beyond my immediate story, poetic prose helps to document experiences of silencing an…
This Ain't Paris Sweetie
This autoethnography explores West African and French identity in the Southern United States. Seven short poems trace back a journey from West Africa and France to the American South and flesh out the contours of a transient and suspended self. A brown immigrant woman, my text reconstructs the embodied experience of racism and sexism in a small conservative community. Poetic prose helps to capture the elusive nature of a narrative, best expressed…
Memories of trauma and organizing
This study builds on social-constructionist approaches to organizational memory studies by exploring how traumatic memories reconstruct present-day organizing practices. Using African feminist ethnography, I explored how war memories shaped market women’s informal credit organizations called ‘susu groups’ in postconflict Liberia. Findings show that traumatic memories engender and sustain three organizing practices: idealization, amplification, an…
Dirty Work at the Intersections of Gender, Class, and Nation
This study explored how market women rework meanings of dirty work and gender, class, and nation in post-conflict Liberia. I used African feminist theory as a lens, which nuances a simplistic and Western-centered reading of market women's empowerment. In this study, the notion of empowerment is connected to the principle of negotiation or the ability to compromise and strategically capitalize on situations. The women used three main strategies to…
The Ekwe Collective
While making clear that black femininity exists and is located in multiple spaces, this essay brings out the intellectual and cultural presence and voices of black women in both national and international feminist communities. We engage black feminist thought (BFT) by offering the example of our community—the Ekwe Collective—a sisterhood of six feminist scholar–activists and their daughters. This essay offers insights on how BFT translates to the…
Following traces
Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it brings forth a methodology of “traces” for organizational ethnography of the shadow, also understood as the realm of the repressed. Second, it highlights the emotional disconnect that organizational ethnographers encounter in traumatized communities and provides suggestions to bridge them. Design/methodology/approach The paper – drawing on autoethnography – incorporates the author’s fieldwor…
Brown Body of Knowledge
In this autoethnographic piece, I offer five short poems reading as a 'tale of erasure' in the academy. The poems document how my particular identities-Brown, immigrant, female, professor-came to bear during the negotiation of immigration status. This tale illuminates the particular intersection of these layered identities with institutional silencing processes. Beyond my immediate story, poetic prose helps to document experiences of silencing an…
Object
Drawing on autoethnography as a genre, this letter of disapplication to the discipline of organizational communication is organized around short poems. Speaking from my positionality as a brown foreign woman of Ivorian and French heritage, I walk the reader through my experience of the walkout at the 2019 National Communication Association Organizational Communication Division's Top Paper Panel. Weaving in recent and distant pasts, I claim that t…
Debunking Eurocentrism in Organizational Communication Theory
This article centers marginal organizational actors—the disenfranchised of the Global South—to remedy their theoretical erasure and disrupt the Anglo-American grand narrative of organizational communication. This task is urgent amidst discussions of decolonization and whiteness in the discipline. We reengage Western theory on liquidity, hereby conceptualized as shape-shifting and adaptive organizing, moving like a liquid at the margins. We draw o…
Introduction
The politics of pre-emption
Research on political homophobia in contemporary African nations tends to focus on the legal, political and social consequences of such homophobia. However, this work remains limited in its treatment of the rise of political homophobia and mobilisation against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights. This article redirects such research by concentrating on the indigenous origins of mobilisation against LGBT rights in Liberia. Focusin…
Akua Ananse Is a “She”
In this essay, I channel Kweku Ananse, the trickster in West African tales. Extending upon this figure, I re-gender Kweku Ananse as Akua Ananse and offer “spider stories” to make sense of my transnational identities as a West African and French woman, who is a professor in US academe. I offer a conversation between Akua Ananse, my French-speaking grandmother figure Marie, and my professional self. My spider stories subvert usual categories of kno…
Mapping Interventions
Engaging organizational communication and rhetorical studies subfields, we develop a case for decolonial and Indigenous approaches that offer texture and depth. In the process, we flip the existing topographic “map” of the field and shift Eurocentric canons undergirding cultural and critical Communication Studies. Drawing on vignettes from our fieldworks, we argue for a decolonial critical intervention to affirm marginalized voices, experiences, …
Quarantined across borders
Embodied transnationalism is characterized by intimate experiences of human-made political borders that define, limit, and restrict flows of the “Other.” In the Quarantined Across Borders collection, contributors from immigrant and diasporic backgrounds address the material and discursive differences in how they experience the pandemic in terms of a public health crisis and public policy response that intersects racialized gender, class, citizens…
No-Organization
This essay explores anti-Blackness and how it structures knowledge production about Africa. It introduces “No-Organization” or the “it” as an invisible discursive frame that constructs the continent as a space devoid of Organization. I use No-Organization to reengage two scholarly approaches invested in decentering the West and addressing the erasure of Africa in Organization Studies. The first approach deconstructs Western-centric representation…
Sociology (14 works) · Political science (9 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Anthropology (5 works) · Art (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Gender Studies (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Law (5 works)