Seeing leadership as service and self-actualization, Scott has welcomed opportunities to lead, and draws on the perspective of vulnerable leadership to participate in collaborative, humble, mutually productive forms of organizing and group decision-making.
At the end of his first year as a tenure-track Assistant Professor, Scott was asked to lead a new graduate program scheduled to begin the subsequent fall. He served as Director of Graduate Studies for nine years, overseeing the MA in Communication, Technology and Society (MACTS), and matriculating over 60 students with a 95% placement rate in related academic or professional fields. In addition to MACTS, the graduate program included a Health Communication Graduate Certificate, a combined BA/MA program, collaborating in an interdisciplinary PhD program in Rhetorics, Communication, and information Design, and helping develop a revised interdisciplinary PhD in Policy Studies. Since 2011, he has served on the Steering Committee for Women’s Leadership, which has expanded from a minor to now include a BA, BS, and minor in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. He has also taught the Women’s Leadership senior capstone class.
(Photo) Clemson Women’s Leadership / Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies Instagram post. Photo by Linda Tindal.
Scott describes a formative leadership experience as being hired in college as Managing Editor of P-form, a Chicago-based international performance art quarterly. Following a graduate student, he worked 20 hours a week at a prestigious nonprofit gallery, managing publication finances and production, and overseeing an editorial board of senior local artists. Although a small publication (circulation approximately 1000), this was an intimidating experience for a 19-year-old, who held the role for two years until graduation, then served the publication in other ways.
“P-form taught me that leadership was about listening and connecting, not control,” says Scott. “The last thing you can control is a group of performance artists!”
Select Work
Since then, he has been passionate about building and energizing new projects to serve local communities and populations (see below), while also serving the discipline of communication as a reviewer for: Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Women’s Studies in Communication, International Journal of Communicaiton, Communication, Culture and Critique, Social Media and Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Television and New Media, Annals of the International Communication Association (Communication Yearbook), Western Journal of Communication, International Communication Association’s Popular Communication, Feminist Scholarship, LGBTQ Studies, and Communication History divisions/interest group; Carolinas Communication Association; McGill-Queen’s University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, SAGE, Media, Communication, & Performing Arts List at Peter Lang Publishing, Research Foundation-Flanders (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen, FWO), National Endowment for the Humanities, MacArthur Fellows Program.
Other service leadership projects include:
Co-founder and Director, Southern Margins International Short Film Festival, 2017- 2018. Committee member, 2019-2020
With Mike McGirr, served as Faculty in Residence for Lightsey Bridge Community, Clemson (2017-2020), organizing campus social and educational activities with a focus on food systems and agriculture.
Head of Marketing and Promotion, Southeast Women's Studies Association annual conference, Clemson University, March 2018
With Adrienne Shaw, co-leader, “Intervention” theme programming at ICA 2017, and co-editor, Interventions: Communication Theory and Practice (2018, Peter Lang).
With Andrew Pyle, developed Strategic Communication in Germany study abroad program and co-led three month-long student trips (2016–2018). Supported by Clemson Internationalization Seed Funding.
Served the International Communication Association as Co-chair, LGBTQ Studies Interest Group (2013-2017), with participation as ICA Board Member, and as Secretary, Communication History Division (2019-2021).
Committee member, Archives project, International Communication Association, 2016-2017
Co-organized OutROAR LGBTQIA speaker series of 7 events at Clemson in 2013-2014: Hank Green (RAND Corp.), Ted Gideonse (UCLA School Medicine), Ryan Wilson (SC Equality), Mary Gray (Microsoft Research/Indiana U.), Tim Miller (artist), Gender Benders SC, Laramie Inside Out screening
With Adrienne Shaw, co-organized an “unconference,” “Technologies of Sex and Gender: Queer Theories and Subjects,” a preconference for the International Communication Association (2014). Secured outside funding so event was free to attendees.
Clemson Values Summit Steering Committee, 2015-2016
Organized Health, Communication, and Science symposium with speakers from RAND Corporation, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, UCLA School of Medicine, and State of Georgia Public Health (2013, Clemson).
With Devon Powers, co-organized preconference, “Historiography as Intervention: Communicating Across Geographies, Communities, and Other Divides,” for International Communication Association (2012). Co-edited subsequent 153-page special section of International Journal of Communication, “Critical Communication History.”
Co-founder, Friends & Queers @ Annenberg, University of Southern California (2005)
Student team, The September Project, international program for library activism, University of Washington 2003-5
Project Mgr., New Prometheans Fire Art Festival, Center on Contemporary Art (Seattle), 1999
Co-founder, Queer Nation Chicago, (1991)
Managing Editor, P-form Arts Quarterly, Randolph St. Gallery (Chicago), 1989-91
Co-founder, GLBT Student Union, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1988)