In this book, Steve Duck, a founder of and prolific crossdisciplinary contributor to the field of relationships research, challenges students to re-examine their assumptions about relationships. Duck shows that in order to understand relationships properly, students must understand the roles that society, language, our taken-for-granted assumptions, and other people who share those assumptions play in the conduct of relationships. By analyzing talk and the material circumstances of our everyday lives, the author provides a number of features that help students apply the information to their own lives:
- Questions to Ask Your Friends: By discussing issues with their friends, students are able to see the cultural and social basis of some of their assumptions
- Discussion Questions: These questions provide thought-provoking topics for individual reflection or class discussion
- Listen in on Your Own Life: This feature asks students to find examples in their own lives and those of their friends
Steve Duck taught in the United Kingdom before taking up the Daniel and Amy Starch Distinguished Research Chair in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa. He has been a professor of communication studies, an adjunct professor of psychology, and a former Dean’s Administrative Fellow and is now Chair of the Rhetoric Department. He has taught interpersonal communication courses, mostly on relationships but also on nonverbal communication, communication in everyday life, construction of identity, communication theory, organizational leadership, and procedures and practices for leaders. More recently, he has taught composition, speaking, and rhetoric, especially for STEM students. By training an interdisciplinary thinker, Steve has focused on the development and decline of relationships, although he has also done research on the dynamics of television production techniques and persuasive messages in health contexts. Steve has written or edited 60 books on relationships and other matters and was the founder and, for the first 15 years, the editor of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. His book Meaningful Relationships: Talking, Sense, and Relating won the G. R. Miller Book Award from the Interpersonal Communication Division of the National Communication Association. Steve cofounded a series of international conferences on personal relationships. He won the University of Iowa’s first Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award in 2001 and the National Communication Association’s Robert J. Kibler Memorial Award in 2004 for “dedication to excellence, commitment to the profession, concern for others, vision of what could be, acceptance of diversity, and forthrightness.” He was the 2010 recipient of the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Helen Kechriotis Nelson Teaching Award for a lifetime of excellence in teaching, and in the same year was elected one of the National Communication Association’s Distinguished Scholars. He received the NCA’s 2019 Mark L. Knapp Award in Interpersonal Communication for career contributions to the study of interpersonal communication. He hopes to make it to the Iowa State Fair one day.
