101 Pat-Downs: An Undercover Look at Airport Security and the TSA is the brainchild of Shawna Malvini Redden, an award winning author and professor who specializes in organizational communication research, teaching and consulting.
The book is the first to offer an inside exploration of the Transportation Security Administration, from the perspective of passengers and TSA officers. Part confessional tale, part investigative research, and part light-hearted social commentary, it presents the inside scoop on airport security showing the hilarious, horrible, and mundane sides of the TSA. Along the way, it offers “pro travel tip” suggestions for making communication in airport security easier.
101 Pat-downs is a perfect traveler’s companion for navigating what one TSO interviewee described as the nation’s “second most hated government agency” (after the IRS, that is). And takeaways from the book can translate to other emotion-charged scenarios where people are forced to communicate with authority figures, such as traffic stops, court appointments, and doctors’ visits.
Malvini Redden holds a doctorate in organizational and interpersonal communication from Arizona State University. Her academic research has received Top Paper awards from the National and International Communication Associations, and has appeared in Management Communication Quarterly, Communication Monographs, Qualitative Health Research, Critical Departures in Qualitative Research, The Review of Communication, and Journal of Applied Communication Research.
In addition to academic and professional writing about communication, she maintains a personal blog called The Bluest Muse. Her personal writing has been featured on BlogHer.com (now She Knows) which reaches 100 million people everyday.