Communicating Hope and Resilience Across the Lifespan

This latest volume in the Lifespan Communication: Children, Families, and Aging series focuses on hope and resilience in the face of life’s adversities. Twenty-two contributors approach the study of hope and resilience in different ways. They examine individuals, relationships, and groups, treating the two qualities as processes, predictors, and outcomes, and focus on specific stages of the lifespan or multiple stages. The authors emphasize the fundamental importance of social interaction. Thirteen chapters are divided into three sections: contributing processes; contexts; imparting hope and resilience. Chapters are: embracing the insights of “Murphy”; on being (and becoming) mindful; “we could sure use a laugh”; fostering hope in a hurtful world; unfolding the transgression scene; (re)envisioning hope & resilience; employment transitions in the aftermath of economic collapse; resilience, work, and family communication across the lifespan; fear of the unknown, hope for the unseen; when all seems lost; the state of cancer care communication across the lifespan; life’s “war stories”; fostering civic resilience and hope through communication activism education. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Gary A. Beck (PhD, University of Texas at Austin) is Assistant Professor of Communication and Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University. His work has been published in Communication Monographs, Personal Relationships, and Journal of Social Psychology.
Thomas J. Socha (PhD, University of Iowa) is Professor of Communication at Old Dominion University. He was founding editor of the Journal of Family Communication and was the recipient of the National Communication Association’s (NCA) Bernard J. Brommel Award for Outstanding Family Communication Scholarship.