Heather J. Stone Receives the Communication Institute Graduate Student Research Grant

Heather J. Stone receives the Communication Institute Graduate Student Research Grant for her research project titled “Young Mormon Women as Insiders/Outsiders: Exploring Tensions of Organizational Membership in Tight-Knit Communities, 1974-2002.”

In Stone’s project, she will use oral history and rhetorical analysis to examine group membership and individual identity among LDS young women in the American West from 1974-2002. She plans on interviewing 25 women who relocated as Mormon teenagers to predominantly LDS communities during the last quarter of the 20th Century. Stone believes that using LDS young women as a case study may explain aspects of religious belonging and help people better understand how social interaction affects religious identity and how local instantiations of religion complicate religious belonging.

The Communication Institute Graduate Student Research Grant program provides a one-time grant of up to $500 to support a graduate student’s research project. The project should strive to support the mission of the Communication Institute, which is to increase the understanding of communication research and theory within academic, professional, and public communities.