Biography
Dr. Dominique Bourg Hacker teaches workplace communication and intercultural communication to BBA students. She has been teaching college-level writing and speaking since 2009 and has been at the WSB since 2018.
Dr. Bourg Hacker has experience working with small and large nonprofits, including the Center for Media and Democracy where she did research on the Federal Reserve and the Asset Guarantee Program as well as edited articles. Collaborating and editing grant proposals as well as communicating daily with donors at other non-profits, Dominique learned the stakes and challenges of writing in the workplace.
Dr. Bourg Hacker spent eight years working with UW’s Writing Center. Along with tutoring a diverse set of students, Dominique coordinated the Online Writing Center and taught several workshops. She also co-directed the English 100 tutorial program. Through this work she developed an approach for delivering feedback to empower writers and help make the revision process more transparent and less intimidating. Collaborative writing and workshopping are main features of her classroom.
Dr. Bourg Hacker’s PhD research focused on how South African and Caribbean writers, activists, and professionals resist and navigate systems of power through writing and community organizing. In both the Professional Workplace Communication and Intercultural Communication classes she draws on decolonial studies to help students see how power shapes communication. In Workplace Communication, she underscores the role dominant culture has in shaping knowledge and space, and helps students consider how power determines the values and goals of workplace communication. In Intercultural Communication, she helps students cultivate self-awareness and intercultural competencies to negotiate cultural boundaries, recognize social inequities, and approach new places and people with respect, openness, and curiosity.
Dr. Bourg Hacker’s research interests now include agency driven feedback strategies, anti-racist pedagogy, and the construction of workplace identities.
Research
Practitioner-Oriented Publications
Bourg Hacker, D. (2018). “RePlotting Value: Community Gardens and Bessie Head’s A Question of Power.” Racial Ecologies
Bourg Hacker, D. (2018). ““Ten dams for one delta seen from Space”: Envisioning Environmentalism in Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life.
Presentations
Conference on College Communication and Composition (2022) Designing Peer Review, Reflective Writing, and ePortfolios for Inclusion and Metacognition: “Feedback Filtering: Empowering Student Writers for the Uncertainty of Workplace Feedback”
ABC Midwestern/Southeastern Business Communication Symposium #3: Asking the Right Questions: Laying a Strong Foundation for Qualitative Business Communication Research (2021) Why Are Students and Instructors So Disappointed with Peer Feedback?: Developing Question-Seeking Pedagogy for Business Communication Peer Feedback