Thirteen graduate students and faculty in the College of Visual and Performing Arts’ Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies (CRS) delivered 22 competitively selected presentations and performances at the National Communication Association’s (NCA) 104th annual convention held Nov. 8-11 in Salt Lake City.
In addition to presenting research, several CRS faculty members received honors and recognition at the conference. Faculty member Dana Cloud was among a small group of scholars who received presidential citations from the NCA for commitment to social justice; Department Chair Charles E. Morris III was named chair-elect of the NCA’s Research Council for 2020-2022; and faculty members Cloud, Morris, Amos Kiewe and Kendall Phillips were invited participants in the Scholars’ Office Hours and Teachers’ Office Hours.
The following CRS graduate students gave presentations:
- Elizabeth Cooney-Petro, “Rhetorical Ecologies of the Handmaid Coalition Movement” and “’I’m One More ‘Whooo’ Away from Going Topless’: Tig Notaro and Queering the Catcall”
- Christina Deka, “My Birth Matters!: Reducing Primary Cesarean Sections and The Visceral Public”
- Chris DiCesare, “Haunting Sex: 1970s Socialist Sexual Politics and Possibilities in the New Left” and “Discovery and its Discontents: Reading and Playing with Narratives of Archival Research”
- Matthew Ringard, “An Azalea for John: Queer Kinship and Metronormativity in S-Town”
- Helene Thompson, “Cursed-Discovery, Colonialism, and Gothic Corruption in Amnesia: The Dark Descent”
- Mikayla Torres, “America’s Free Speech: Silencing and Censoring Sexual Assault Survivors”
The following CRS faculty gave presentations:
- Dana Cloud, “Developing Strategies to Protect Academic Freedom in Era of Watchlists, Cyberstalking, and Death Threats” and “The Culture Wars Redux: Free Speech and Academic Freedom”
- Kathleen Feyh, “Communicating Justice and Liberation in the Trumpian Era: A Time for Play or Not?” and “Womentoring: Supporting Adjuncts and Contingent Faculty: What can you do?”
- Lyndsay Michalik Gratch, “The Virtual Storyteller,” “Breading through Change” and “Clue 2018”
- Charles E. Morris III, “Archive, Field, and the Promises of Rhetorical Interiors”
- Kendall Phillips, “Ghosts, Guns, and Damsels in Distress: Masculinity in Early Horror Films,” “Monstrous Identities: Critical Rhetoric and the Horror Film,” “The Time of/for Memory? Rhetoric, Violence, and Temporalities” and “The Scale of Our Memory: Spectacle in the Commemoration of Gallipoli”
- Erin Rand, “Queering the Sexting Panic: Black Lesbian Desire and the Digital Promiscuity of the Child”
- Sylvia Sierra, “Playing with In Situ Perspectives and the Methodological Challenges for Studying Language and Media Use in Everyday Life”
The National Communication Association advances communication as the discipline that studies all forms, modes, media and consequences of communication through humanistic, social scientific and aesthetic inquiry. The NCA serves the scholars, teachers and practitioners who are its members by enabling and supporting their professional interests in research and teaching.