Lisa Chuang PH.D.
College of Liberal Arts - Department of Arts, Communications, Languages, and Media
Education:
* Ph.D., Communication Information Science, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
* M.A., Communication, Hawaiʻi Pacific University
* B.A. Music, Pacific Lutheran University
Lisa Chuang specializes in teaching and research in the areas of intercultural communication, social media and research methods. Lisa’s research and teaching philosophy has largely been shaped by her experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Northern Thailand (2007-2009), where she served as a teacher to an indigenous marginalized group of ethnically Karen students. It was here that she realized the importance of education and its ability to give people agency. Agency has informed the strategies and teaching methods that she uses in the classrooms, where students are actively involved in identifying key issues and applying theories and concepts learned to their own personal experience/immediate environment and take an active role in making positive changes in their communities.
Lisa’s research areas are diverse and range from publications in intercultural interaction on social media, motivational factors of Reddit users, music as rhetoric to examination of Korean drama consumption in the U.S., and Saudi social media usage. They have been published in Communication Studies, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, Journal of Middle East Media, and presented at conferences for the International Communication Association (ICA) and Hawai‘i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). Currently, her research focuses examining Saudi student use of social media to interact with non-family members of the opposite sex using a social media affordance specific model, which is a follow-up to her previous paper published with former MA student Fahad Alzahrani in the Journal of Middle East Media.
Lisa serves as the Department Chair for the Dept. of Arts, Communication, Languages and Media (ACLM) and has enjoyed helping to support the needs of dynamic and growing programs. She sees the ACLM Department as a perfect combination of her background as a music major, a theater kid, a communication researcher and professional, and a speaker of other languages.
Outside of teaching and research, Lisa enjoys singing, swimming in the ocean, hiking in the mountains, eating dim sum, drinking boba and spending time with her husband and two boys, Sidney and Charlie. As a parent of an autistic child, she is passionate about helping those with special needs thrive.
