Bio

Daena J. Goldsmith is Professor of Rhetoric & Media Studies at Lewis & Clark College and Associate Dean for Faculty Development.  Her teaching and research focus on how our patterns of communication create identities, relationships, and communities. Her work is published in Journal of Communication, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, Social Science & Medicine, Communication Monographs, Human Communication Research, and Journal of Applied Communication.  Her award-winning book, Communicating Social Support, examines how we communicate support to one another through everyday stresses and life crises. Her scholarship has been recognized with the National Communication Association’s Gerald R. Miller Book Award , Bill Eadie Distinguished Scholarly Article Award, and Franklin H. Knower Article Award.

Professor Goldsmith’s teaching covers a range of topics, including health narratives and narrative medicine, interpersonal communication, social media, and research methods.  In 2017, she was awarded the Lorry Lokey Faculty Excellence Award.  She is a member of the Board of the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative .

Her current project, Polyphonic Resistance: Blogging Motherhood and Autism (due out in 2027) shows how a loosely connected network of “mommy bloggers” in the early 2000s used storytelling to create alternative ways of understanding mothering and accepting autism.