Mount Saint Vincent University

Faculty Member, Dept. of Communication Studies

Professor

About

Patricia Parsons is currently Professor of Communication Studies and a past chairman of the Department of Public Relations at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax NS, Canada where she has taught since 1989.  Prof. Parsons teaches communication ethics & strategic planning in both the baccalaureate and Masters degree programs.

Her professional and academic research and writing have been primarily in the areas of public relations & communication ethics and strategy, and healthcare communication.

Her interest in ethics began as an undergraduate in health sciences and continued through graduate school and into her career evolution from health care into healthcare communication.  She specialized in writing for the general public about complex health issues such as ethics, publishing her first book in 1988 on the ethics and politics of organ transplantation in Canada, an industry where she worked in communication and procurement for several years. When she moved into public relations/communication education, she was the department's choice to develop the ethics curriculum for the undergraduate degree program; she published her first academic paper on public relations ethics in 1993. 

She is the author or co-author of nine books and dozens of papers for the professional and lay press. Recent books include A Manager’s Guide to PR Projects: A Practical Approach published in 2003 by Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc. Publishers in New Jersey and her most recent book, Ethics in Public Relations: A Guide to Best Practice which was released in 2004 by Kogan Page in London, in association with the Institute for Public Relations in the UK.  The first edition has been translated into Italian and Indonesian and the second edition was published in late 2008.

Prof. Parsons is a popular speaker on topics of ethics and strategy at public relations and corporate communications conferences.  She has been a frequent speaker at the American College of Healthcare Executives in Chicago.
 
Prof. Parsons pioneered on-line teaching in her department at MSVU where she is currently developing & teaching online content for the graduate program, and has been an on-line course developer and instructor for the University of Victoria in their post-graduate certificate program in PR. For five years she was the monthly ethics columnist for the on-line publication PR Canada. She is an accredited member of the Canadian Public Relations Society, and was admitted to the CPRS College of Fellows in 2005. 

Prof. Parsons is Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Public Relations & Communication Management.

Prof. Parsons also writes creative non-fiction and historical fiction in her "spare" time.

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