Lisa Chuang PH.D.
College of Liberal Arts - Department of Arts, Communications, Languages, and Media
Program Director, Master of Arts in Strategic Communication
Associate Professor of Communication
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 researching 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 Program Director for the Master of Arts in Strategic Communication Program and has enjoyed helping to grow a dynamic program that adjusts to the demands of an everchanging field. Over the years, she has enjoyed mentoring students while serving on over 50 thesis/capstone project committees. She’s grateful that she is able to use her creativity to create new classes within the program, such as a course on User Experience and Design that she recently taught as a special topics course.
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.
