Originally published December 7, 2015
Professor of Communication Arvind Singhal, Ph.D., was selected to deliver the Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture at the 2015 National Communication Association annual convention.
Singhal’s lecture marked the start of the 101st convention, which was held Nov. 19-22 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The talk was titled “FLIP IT: How Complex Social Problems Can Be Solved Simply and Communicatively by Looking for Positive Deviance.”
Positive Deviance (PD) – a specialty of Singhal’s that he teaches at UTEP – guides groups to discover hidden solutions to complex social problems through unusual collaborative interaction.
The National Communication Association’s administrative committee established the Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture in 1994 to feature the most accomplished researchers in the field. The topic of the lecture changes annually so as to capture the wide range of research being conducted in the field and to demonstrate the relevance of that work to society at large.
Previous Arnold lecturers include some of the most significant academics in contemporary communication: Northwestern University’s Dwight Conquergood and David Zarefsky; Celeste Condit of the University of Georgia; James Carey of Columbia University; Eric King Watts of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Brenda Allen of the University of Colorado.