Organizational Communication Mini Conference

Over a dozen graduate students and faculty attended the annual Organizational Communication Mini Conference (OCMC), held this year at Northwestern University. This annual conference, hosted two years ago by our department, is a graduate-student run event for other graduate students (but with faculty feedback and participation). It brings together a community of scholars to see some of the cutting-edge research being done by early career scholars in organizational communication. 

UT Austin had a very strong presence at the conference, with five students who are on or nearly on the job market making public presentations: 

• Yohanna Tesfai - Shaping Tomorrow with Yesterday: The Temporal Structuring of Organizational Memory. 
• Yifan Xu - Imaginaries of a Robotics Future: Material Discursive Organizing to Achieve Robotic Autonomy.
• Jiayu Sun - Organizing Memories: Communicative Dynamics of Hyperlocal Disaster-related Decision Making in Communities. 
• Stephanie Menhart - Adoption And Adaptation Of Generative Artificial Intelligence Tools For Communication Professionals.
• Bhoopali Nandurkar - Peeling the Onion: Unraveling the Layers of Communicative Visibility through Sociomaterial Practices in Onion Supply Chains in India.

In addition, we had 6 students do poster presentations of their research. Those students included Mir Rabby, Emily Norman, Mackenzie Shekar, Xiaotong Liu, Yixuan Liu, and Nicole Butterbaugh. Faculty advisors in attendance included Keri Stephens, Shiv Ganesh, Sam Shorey, and Craig Scott. A number of graduate program alums—including Delaney Harness, Brett Robertson, Scott D’Urso, Stacey Connaughton, Matt Koschmann, Brittany Peterson, and Roth Smith—who are now in faculty positions elsewhere were also in attendance

As Scott noted about the department’s work at OCMC, “The presentations were strong and memorable. The posters attracted great attention. And the UT presence was quite visible.” Congratulations to all the students and faculty from UT Austin who we part of this year’s OCMC.