Department faculty members and graduate students received multiple honors at the annual convention of the International Communication Association (ICA). The conference, which was held virtually, featured a number of scholarly papers/posters by department members. Additionally, several faculty members are engaged in official leadership roles with the Association.
Shiv Ganesh and Natalie (Talia) Stroud were both named ICA Fellows, which is the highest honor bestowed by the Association on its members. Fellow status in ICA is primarily a recognition of distinguished scholarly contributions to the broad field of communication as demonstrated by a documented record of scholarly achievement. Candidates are nominated by ICA members, and must receive a majority YES vote from current Fellows, and approval by the Board of Directors, in order to achieve Fellows status. Anita Vangelisti, who was selected as a Fellow two years ago, gave her official Fellow address this year.
Department members dominated the awards in ICA’s Organizational Communication Division. Craig Scott received the prestigious Frederic M. Jablin Award for Outstanding Contributions to Organizational Communication. The award, which is named after long-time department faculty member Fred Jablin, is given annually to a member of the division who has made significant contributions to the field over a career. Ph.D. alum Brett Robertson won the highly-competitive Redding Dissertation Award for the top dissertation completed in 2020. Robertson’s work was titled Developing resilience through communication and community: Natural disaster preparedness in retirement communities, and was supervised by Keri Stephens. Jeff Treem received a Top 4 Paper award from the division for his co-authored piece titled After-Hour Connectivity as a Resource: How Connectivity Reduces Exhaustion. Shiv Ganesh was chosen as the respondent for the Top 4 panel.
Multiple graduate students won honors as well. Mian “James” Jia had a top-two student paper on the top paper panel in the Language and Social Interaction Division with his work titled, Co-Operative Actions in Chinese Freestyle Rap Battles. Jared Jensen put together an especially entertaining video for a BEST (brief, entertaining scholarly talk) session for his paper titled Toxic expertise: When knowledge performance diminishes dialogue. That presentation (watch that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6kaHLCBwqE) won a Best of the BEST award.
Several faculty members also delivered keynotes at the conference, chaired major association committees/taskforces, or held division offices. Talia Stroud delivered the keynote address for the pre-conference “Media Performance and Social Inclusion.” Craig Scott chaired the ICA association-wide Early Career Scholar Award Committee. Shiv Ganesh chaired ICA’s Membership and Internationalization Committee. In addition, Mike Butterworth was the program planner for the Sports Communication Interest Group and Keri Stephens is the incoming chair of the Mobile Communication Interest Group.
Congratulations to all those who were recognized for their excellence and leadership at this year’s ICA conference.