Students and faculty members from The College of Wooster Department of Communication Studies received exceptional recognition at the National Communication Association meeting in New Orleans in November including a “Chapter of the Year” award for the National Communication Honor Society and awards and recognition for students and faculty.
Wooster’s chapter of Lambda Pi Eta, the National Communication Honor Society, won “Chapter of the Year” at the conference, recognizing their success at fulfilling the goals of the society, including increasing interest in the field of communication, promoting professional development among communication majors, and establishing close relationships between faculty and students.
Professor of communication studies Denise Bostdorff said that Wooster’s chapter of Lambda Pi Eta’s initiatives over the past year included an annual communication studies alumni forum, a Haunted McGaw Halloween celebration for children of faculty and staff, a graduate school information session and internship open house, partnership with the International Student Association in creating a public forum on issues that international students face on campus, and celebratory events for majors and faculty members. Bostdorff and Michelle Johnson, associate professor of communication studies, are co-advisors for the organization.
Wooster students and faculty received additional recognition at the conference. A Wooster student and recent graduate were selected to present papers at the conference in competitive processes. Jada Frost ’23 delivered her paper “Intersectionality in Response to Trump’s Twitter Rants: Women of Color Challenging Hegemony in Politics” on a panel alongside second-year master’s students. Bostdorff said that the paper, which was originally written for her rhetorical criticism class, “analyzed the responses of ‘the Squad’—Reps. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — all four of whom are women of color—in response to President Donald Trump’s racist attacks on them.”
Hannah Nguyen ’22 was selected to present on Lambda Pi Eta’s “Top Papers” panel. Her paper, which she originally wrote for Bostdorff’s political rhetoric class, was titled, “Exposing Socialism: Secrecy and Disclosure as Rhetorical Forms in Vietnamese Americans for Trump as President Again’s ‘Open Letter to Vietnamese Youth.” 
Assistant professor of communication studies Zhenyu Tian was awarded the 2022 Association for Chinese Communication Studies (ACCS) Outstanding Thesis/Dissertation Award for his dissertation “Women Entrepreneurs in China: Dialectical Discourses, Situated Activities, and the (Re)production of Gender and Entrepreneurship,” as well as a Top Four Paper Award from the National Communication Association Organizational Communication Division and a ACCS Top Paper Award for a collaborative paper.
Top Featured image: Jada Frost ’23 presents “Intersectionality in Response to Trump’s Twitter Rants: Women of Color Challenging Hegemony in Politics” on a panel alongside second-year master’s students.
Original source can be found here.
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