The West Chair Holder
Brandon Bouchillon holds the George R. West, Jr. Chair of Excellence in Communication and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he is also an Associate Professor of Communication. He was appointed to the chair in January 2026 following a national search.
Brandon Bouchillon, West Chair of Excellence in Communication and Public Affairs.
His research asks how people learn to trust one another, and whether trust can develop through media-based communication. Across a decade of work with national survey samples and experiments, he has studied the communication skills that make trust possible, along with the social capital that flows from it, and the ways in which new technologies both extend and supplement face-to-face connection.
He is particularly interested in the use of role-playing games as a form of structured contact between groups. One game he uses allows participants to create immigrant characters and work through the process of naturalizing. Results suggest that shared experiences created during the process of role-playing lead to greater empathy and trust.
He is currently studying how people use artificial intelligence for companionship and emotional support, and what that usage does to their well-being as well as their relationships with other people.
Bouchillon is the author of Competence, Presence, Trust, and Hyperpersonal-ness: Dissolving the Boundary Between Digital and Physical Life (Lexington Books, 2022), and his research appears in New Media & Society, Computers in Human Behavior, Social Science Computer Review, Telematics and Informatics, Behaviour & Information Technology, and Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies. He has written for a general audience in The Conversation, where his work on role-playing and immigration was republished by Popular Science, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
He came to UTC from the University of Arkansas, where he was an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Strategic Media. He holds a Ph.D. in Mass Communications from Texas Tech University, an M.A. in Communication from East Tennessee State University, and a B.S. in Journalism from Middle Tennessee State University. Before entering academia he worked as a journalist, including at the Kingsport Times-News and Mountain Xpress.