By Jeremy Rosenberg

USC Annenberg doctoral students and faculty members were big winners at the recently concluded 61st annual International Communication Association Conference.

Four USC Annenberg doctoral students received "top paper" awards in a wide range of categories, and five others were elected to top leadership and scholarship positions and designations. Various other USC Annenberg participants chaired conference sessions and presented their work.

What does this bounty of USC Annenberg honors indicate? "It attests to the strength and the breadth of the program," Larry Gross said. (Gross is pictured above right, with conference keynote speaker Noam Chomsky.)

Gross, director of the School of Communication, was among approximately 60 Trojans – a list is here – who participated in the conference, which took place in Boston from May 26-30.

The event is arguably the communication discipline's leading big tent gathering. This year's conclave set records for both largest attendance and greatest number of papers submitted.

During the conference, Gross was ratified as ICA President for 2011-2012. This makes him the third active member of the USC Annenberg faculty to have held that top position. Professors Peggy McLaughlin and Peter Monge are the others.

Gross spent the past year as ICA President-Elect. His responsibilities included chairing the planning group for this year's conference. Under Gross' direction, that meant the event carried a moniker familiar to USC Annenberg insiders.

"Our conference theme, 'Communication @ the Center,'" Gross wrote in a welcome letter to the event, "is intended to highlight the centrality of communication scholarship by encouraging panels that identify core components of critical challenges and issues...and explore the role of communication studies in addressing them."

The letter continued: "At the same time, we will focus on the centrality of communication – as a phenomenon and a field of study – to any coherent and convincing intellectual world view."

Gross and his fellow planners incorporated into the conference for the first time various digital innovations. Tweets were encouraged under the hashtag, #ICA11. Opening and closing plenary sessions – chaired by Gross – were streamed live online. And a "Virtual Conference" component allowed several hundred additional scholars to participate from afar.

The Virtual segment included 100 papers not available at the physical event, plus a pair of pre-recorded keynote addresses. One of these was, "Spreadable Media," by USC Annenberg Professor Henry Jenkins.

USC Annenberg doctoral students earning top paper prizes at the conference included:

 

• Meryl Alper, "Representatives of Non-American Foreigners in the American Children’s Television," top student paper in the Children, Adolescent and the Media category;
• Garrett Broad and Carmen Gonzalez, "Intergroup Relations in South Los Angeles - Combining Communication Infrastructure and Contact Hypothesis Approaches," top student paper in the Intergroup Communication category; and
• Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, "Setting the Collective Memory: Empirical Analysis of Mainstrem Media’s Influence on Collective Memory in Israel," top student paper in the Mass Communication category.

 

Also, Peter Monge and Matthew Scott Weber (Ph.D. Communication '10) won a top paper award in the Organizational Communication category for, "Industries in Turmoil: Driving Transformation During Periods of Disruption."

Weber (now an assistant professor at Rutgers University) also was honored with the W. Charles Redding Dissertation Award in organizational communication for his dissertation, “Media Reinvented: the Transformation of News in a Networked Society.” The members of his dissertation committee were Manuel Castells, Mark Kennedy (USC Marshall School of Business) and Peter Monge, chair. Monge also won the Dissertation Adviser award for his service on Weber’s paper.

In addition, Cuihua Shen (Ph.D. Communication ’10), an assistant professor at the University of Texas, Dallas, was a finalist for the Herbert A. Dordick Dissertation Award (named in honor of a former Annenberg faculty member) from the Communication and Technology Division. Her adviser was Peter Monge.

Professors Dmitri Williams (ICA Young Scholar Award) and Patricia Riley (Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Organizational Communication) were among other faculty honorees.

So too were Professors Janet Fulk and Sandra Ball-Rokeach. Fulk was elected an ICA Fellow, an accomplishment bestowed on less than 1% of the membership, and Ball-Rokeach won the B. Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award.

Ball-Rokeach is the third active USC Annenberg faculty member to receive the mentorship award – joining Gross and Monge. Fulk, meanwhile, is the fourth USC Annenberg faculty member to become a Fellow. She joins Gross, Monge and Ball-Rokeach.

Next year's ICA Conference is scheduled to take place in Phoenix, Arizona.

List of attendees
Tweets from the conference
ICA Conference homepage

 

What do you think? Join the conversation on our Facebook page.