Learning the Stories Before Us

Assistant Professor of Communication Sophie Downing, PhD, traces her path to the University of San Diego back to her earliest days in a classroom. From her experiences at a preschool tucked beside a bustling college campus to a series of public schools and later her liberal arts and graduate studies, each stage of her education offered something different. The collection of these experiences, she says, continues to guide her as a teacher and researcher.

This year, Downing joins the College of Arts and Sciences to teach courses in interpersonal and family communication, drawing on her interests in organizational culture, identity and qualitative research. In teaching these classes, she is most excited to help students connect course material with their own lived experiences.

“Communication is inherently practical,” she says. “Students have a wealth of lived experiences to draw on, helping them to meaningfully connect and critically engage with course material.”

Her classes lean into narrative work — research papers rooted in students’ personal or family dynamics, book clubs that explore memoirs and novels and analyses of how media portrays relationships. The goal is to help students bridge theory with everyday life in meaningful, reflective ways.

Downing says joining USD has felt like stepping into a community where people genuinely care. Her students bring thoughtful questions and strong engagement to the classroom. Her faculty colleagues have been “immensely supportive,” easing her transition and offering mentorship. And across campus, from the library to administrative offices to custodial teams, she has experienced a consistent warmth.

She’s also grateful to return to the West Coast and to build a life in San Diego. “The opportunity to put down roots in such a beautiful place is not lost on me, and I am very excited to continue immersing myself in the community on campus and in the surrounding area.” she says.

Downing’s current scholarship includes two manuscripts exploring belonging within an engineering college — looking at how organizational norms shape students’ experiences. 

“The first [manuscript] examines the symbolic and material manifestations of class that emerged in our participants’ narratives — spanning from institutional hierarchies to bias against the local Appalachian region. Relatedly, the second explores the inequality regimes present in the college.”

She is also revisiting her dissertation, an oral history project about her extended family.

“I examined how families use stories to construct family boundaries, identity, characters and homes; to address ambiguous family forms and dynamics; and to manage loss and absence,” she says.

The project drew on interviews with 27 family members as well as her own autoethnographic writing. Through these accounts, she explored how families build a shared sense of identity, how they draw boundaries around who is “in” and who is “out,” and how they portray themselves through the characters they construct in their stories. She also examined how families create a sense of home through memory and language, how they negotiate ambiguous or changing relationships and how they respond to loss and absence.

For Downing, studying family communication means understanding families as storytellers. The stories they tell about childhood, conflict, migration, tradition, joy and grief become the frameworks through which individuals learn who they are and how they relate to the world. 

This insight carries directly into her teaching. When Downing’s students begin analyzing their own family communication, they often uncover patterns they had not previously named — cultural practices, inherited expectations, emotional inside jokes, generational communication habits or unspoken tensions. By learning to articulate the stories they grew up with, students begin to see communication not as something that simply happens, but as a process shaped by shared experiences, memory and relationship.

Whether she is examining inequity within an engineering college, unraveling decades of family stories or working through her morning crossword, Downing brings curiosity, clarity and care to her work. She invites students to approach communication with the same patience and attention: to look closely, listen deeply and recognize how stories shape the ways people understand themselves and each other.

As she settles into USD, Downing is excited to continue blending research, narrative and mentorship in a community that values connection and inquiry. Her hope is that students leave her courses not only with stronger analytical tools but with a richer understanding of the communication patterns that shape their relationships — and their lives.

— Emma Pirhala