Description: This paper discusses research into grandparents raising children with disabilities. Abstract: This study provides factual evidence and testimonials on personal, family, and school issues that grandparents experience as primary caregivers for grandchildren. The research study focused on six components: (1) school efforts to collaborate with grandparents, (2) quality of services, (3) comprehension of grandchild's disability, (4) impact of special education services on family life, (5) availability of support agencies and caregiver training programs, and (6) physical/mental health tendencies of grandparents. Knowledge of the problems grandparents experience is important because special education advocates may gain useful knowledge to expand the success of the partnership with grandparents raising children with disabilities. The ultimate goal of the project is to explore means to contribute knowledge and to increase visibility of the need for research on how educators and other professionals can better assist grandparents with their unique needs in parenting and educating children with disabilities.

Description: This book chapter discusses different media texts targeted at a different audience, magazines written for an audience of teenaged girls, which also work to naturalize male sexuality as aggressive and predatory. The authors study advice columns and articles in these magazines that depict teenaged boys as sexually forceful and emotionally stunted, and that encourage girl readers to expect and enable such behaviors.

Description: This paper discusses research on negotiating in the 21st century. Abstract: Hostage negotiation at its core is a communicative event developed to save lives through interpersonal tactics. The current protocol in hostage negotiation relies primarily on verbal communication through landlines. This protocol severely handicaps negotiators as it only open up a single channel of communication. The purpose of this study proposal is to promote the inclusion of new technology, specifically cellphones with text, call, and video chat capabilities, into hostage negotiation situations. The injection of new technology, and thus new communicative mediums, allows the negotiator to adapt to the hostage taker's fluctuating level of communication apprehension, communication competency, and levels of trust between them. The impact of new technology on hostage negotiation will be measured using controlled simulations accompanied by a completion questionnaire.