Donald P. Cushman Memorial Award

NCA Awards for Outstanding Scholarship

The Donald P. Cushman Memorial Award recognizes Dr. Cushman’s mentorship of students, which centered on excellence in scholarship, as well as socialization as scholars in the communication discipline. The award honors the top-ranked student-authored paper from all NCA units that competitively rank papers for programming at the NCA Annual Convention.

Year	Award Winner
2023	Olivia Watson & Jana Kent, University of Missouri, “’Couldn’t you get an American?’: Navigating Communicative Disenfranchisement Experienced by Transracial Adoptive Families.”
2022	Chelsea E. Moss, University of Florida & Taylor S. Vasquez, University of Florida, "'Make Your Family Proud': Analyzing the Communication of Roles and Identity in Disney's Encanto."
2021	Corinne Mitsuye Sugino, “Intimacy, Exoticism, and Asian/American Women: Theorizing Multiculturalism as Fetish.”
	Anjuliet G. Woodruffe, “Conversations with My Son: A Poetic Autoethnography of Black Mothering Experiences.”
2020	Luxuan Wang, “Race, Social Media News Use, and Political Participation”
2019	Elizabeth A. Hintz, “Childfree and ‘Bingoed’: Competing Discourses of Reproductive Normativity and Autonomy Animated in Online Narratives of Conversations about Voluntary Childlessness”
2018	Benjamin Firgens, "The Circulation of Destruction between 1939 and 1941 and the Failure of the American Imagination"
2017	Stacey Overholt, “Health Becomes You: (Re)Presenting Data Collection via Health Surveillance Technologies in the Era of Big Data”
2016	Sonia Ivancic, Ohio University, "Biopower and Disciplining Bodies in the Wake of an 'Obesity Epidemic': A Poststructural Feminist Analysis of the Soda Ban"
2015	Melissa Meade, Temple University, "In the Shadow of the Coal Breaker: Place and Landscape in the Anthracite Coal Mining Region"
2014	Kathleen M. de Onis, Indiana University, "Toxic Coloniality: Extracting Natural Gas Industry Rhetoric and Resisting its Appeals"
2013	Hillary Palmer, University of Georgia, "Mexico's Drug War Feminized: The New York Times and Visual Narratives of Dichotomized Women"
2012	David Askay, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, "Silence in the Crowd: The Spiral of Silence Contributing to the Positive Bias of Opinions in an Online Review System"
2011	Katie Margavio Striley, Ohio University, "Last One Picked in Gym: Reclaiming Narrative Voice in Gifted Children's Stories of Ostracism"
2010	Elizabeth Lenaghan, Northwestern University, “Making Material Matter: How Contemporary Collectors Remediate the Medium of the Book”
2009	Abigail Selzer King, Purdue University, “Drawing Paul Revere as a Klansman: Image, Rhetoric, and Anachronistic Arguments for Legitimacy”
	Bryan McCann, Marian University, "Genocide as Representative Anecdote: Crack Cocaine, the CIA, and the Nation of Islam in Gary Webb’s ‘Dark Alliance’”
2008	Eric S. Jenkins, University of Georgia, “The Towers of Babble and the Passage of the USA PATRIOT Act.”
2007	Andy J. Merolla, The Ohio State University, “Modeling Relational Continuity in Distance Relationships”