ABSTRACT
Privacy has emerged as a prominent topic of inquiry and has made individuals evermore mindful of its presence in everyday life. Privacy is a value in many cultures, contexts, academic disciplines, and within legal domains. Yet, privacy is often difficult to unpack. In each sphere, there are often a multiplicity of ways to think about privacy as is represented in the chapters found in this volume. This chapter discusses privacy from a communication science perspective focused on a theoretical understanding of privacy through the lens of Communication Privacy Management theory (CPM) (Petronio 1991, 2002, 2016; Petronio and Durham 2008). Communication privacy management research ascribes to using social science methodologies in juxtaposition to the historic disciplinary base of rhetoric and public speaking that reflects early developments of the communication discipline in the United States (National Communication Association 2018). Communication science typically uses both quantitative and qualitative methods rather than rhetorical or humanistic inquiry. However, the scope of communication studies in the United States sits side by side with the historic approaches focused on the power of communicating through public speaking in everyday life.
