Regional Association News
CSCA
The CSCA 2020 Pre-conference theme will be “Advanced Qualitative Analysis and Coding.” In this special pre-conference session, participants will review and practice multiple approaches to interpretive analysis of qualitative data that are well-suited for Communication research. Scholars will present their work featuring innovative approaches. Attendees will dig into their own projects as they work to consider what analytical tools might be beneficial. This session will feature Jimmie Manning, Kathy Denker, and Karina Willes.
To gain the most benefit from this seminar, you should have at least completed one course in qualitative research methods and be actively working on a project using qualitative data. Register early to receive pre-reading materials. Thank you to Second Vice President, Debbie Ford, for all of her work on this. We hope you will join us April 14-19 for #CSCA2020 in Chicago!
ECA
Registration is now open for the 2020 Eastern Communication Association Convention, to be held April 1-5 at the Hyatt Regency Baltimore in Baltimore, MD.
Primary Planner Jennifer Waldeck has modeled her theme of “Innovation” by putting together events and programming that go beyond the usual and expected offerings. In her welcome message on the ECA main page, Waldeck writes, “An elegant convention-wide luncheon with an internationally-known academic superstar giving the keynote? Check!... A workshop connecting faculty from all types of institutions on refreshing our teaching and re-tooling our courses? Check!... Innovative and visionary art? Bourbon? Guinness? Baseball? Check, check, check, check!”
Specific programming includes the biennial Connect Conference, three research methods workshops, a luncheon at minimal additional cost to attendees, the 10th annual James C. McCroskey & Virginia P. Richmond Undergraduate Scholars Conference, field trips, awards presentations, and special keynote speaker Dr. Andrew F. Hayes, Professor of Psychology and Communication at The Ohio State University. There will also be a special opportunity to mourn, remember, and celebrate the life of Dr. James W. Chesebro, ECA and NCA Past President.
Some events require pre-registration. Event slots and the hotel room block are filling up fast! Registration and membership can be completed on our main registration page. For hotel booking at the convention rate, please use the room reservation portal.
ECA looks forward to seeing you in Baltimore in April!
SSCA
The 90th Annual Southern States Communication Association’s Convention will be held April 1-5 in Frisco, Texas. The theme of the convention is “Disruptive Communication: A Discipline Without Constraints.”
The convention will feature a Presidential Spotlight Panel, four Vice President Spotlight Panels and a keynote address by Dr. Brenda J. Allen, Emerita Professor at the University of Colorado, Denver.
Saturday, 12:30 p.m.-2:30 p.m.
Room: Frisco 1
Southern States Communication Association 90th Annual Awards Luncheon
Sponsor: Southern States Communication Association
Keynote Speaker: Brenda J. Allen, University of Colorado, Denver
Disrupting Leadership through Radical Inclusion
This interactive keynote will inspire participants to reimagine “leadership” and how leadership can cultivate radical inclusion in Communication scholarship and practice. The keynote will explore ways to enact leadership disruptively within and beyond our roles and institutions in order to effect change in our discipline and society at large.
Friday, 10:15 a.m.-11:30 a.m.
Room: Frisco 7
President’s Spotlight Panel
Disruption at the Ballot Box: The Long Road and the Crossroads from Suffragists and Civil Rights Activists to Contemporary Ballot Box Battles
Chair: Eletra Gilchrist-Petty, University of Alabama in Huntsville
- Leslie J. Harris, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
- Rita Kirk, Southern Methodist University
- Felecia J. Ross, The Ohio State University
This panel was inspired by the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment. This panel will include discussion of how women have lobbied for influence and how the black press covered the suffrage movement. The panel will also address contemporary concerns for voices lost and gained in elections. Panelists utilize perspectives from journalism, public affairs, political debate analysis, social movements, and feminist rhetoric.
Thursday, 5:00 p.m.-6:15 p.m.
Room: Frisco 7
Vice President Spotlight
Disrupting Death: Grievability, Indifference, and Transgressive Deaths
Chair: Christine S. Davis, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Transgressive Deaths: A Critical Examination of Radical Deaths of Women and Children in Ireland’s Magdalen Homes
- Christine S. Davis, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Dear Death: An Epistle, with Epiphanies
- Christopher N. Poulos, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Indifferent to Death: Why Photographic Documentation of Genocide, Terror and the Ravages of War Too Often Leave Us Cold
- Jonathan L. Crane, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Breaking the Fourth Wall: An Exploration of Modern Funerals in Western Society
- Cara T. Mackie, Florida Southern College
Given human beings’ innate drive to remain alive, all deaths are disruptive, but some deaths are more disruptive than others. For example, deaths of loved ones still in their prime disrupt the social order and our ideas of the way things are “supposed to be.” Death is used as a weapon or an agent of control, coercion, or punishment far too often in many places and times, including the present. Death used in this way also disrupts because it severs the thread of humanity that holds community together. Reactions to death can also be disruptive; complicated grief and problematic bereavement, familial conflict, and unresolved farewells disrupt relational and cultural expectations for mourning. Inversely, cultural rituals and communication attempt to disrupt death or to disrupt the pain of death and the memory of our mortality. Ultimately, death always has the last word, but we do control our individual and collective responses to and engagement with the inevitable losses. The panelists utilize historical and cultural criticism, ethnographic and auto-ethnographic narrative, and critical poetry to examine the ways in which death disrupts and is disrupted.
Friday, 2:45 p.m.-4:00 p.m.
Room: Whirlaway
Vice President Spotlight
Disrupting Disruptive Pedagogy: De-Centering the Pedagogy of Communication Whiteness
Chair: Ashley Hall, Illinois State University
Disrupting Whiteness Standards when Responding to Racially-Motivated Campus Incidents
- Eletra Gilchrist-Petty, University of Alabama in Huntsville
Performing Otherness While De-Centering Whiteness in the PWI Classroom
- Tina M. Harris, Louisiana State University
Can We Share the Light? De-centering Communication Whiteness with Communication Pedagogy
- Lionnell Smith, University of Memphis
Teaching in a Time of Trumpism
- Carolina R. Webber, University of South Carolina Upstate
Deliverance through Deliberate Disruption: How the Inducement of Conflict Transforms Communication Pedagogy
- Courtney N. Wright, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
This panel explores the various ways through which Communication scholars use and/or can use their pedagogical agency to de-center whiteness in Communication instruction. A discussion on disruptive pedagogies invokes an interrogation of how indigenous knowledges, histories, practices, and traditions have been historically marginalized, erased, or ignored in Communication education. This panel attempts to address the question of how Communication pedagogy has been and can be disruptive and disrupted. Furthermore, panelists will address the question of why it is necessary for Communication pedagogy to be disrupted. Drawing on their years of experience and expertise, panelists from a number of positions within the subfields of Instructional Communication and Communication Pedagogy will discuss their experiences and struggles with the pedagogy of Communication whiteness and will offer strategies to disrupt the discursive process of whiteness that is too often manifest in Communication education.
Friday, 4:15 p.m.-5:30 p.m.
Room: Frisco 7
Vice President Spotlight
Disrupting Beliefs and Faiths: The Role of Race in Religious Communication
Chair: Andre E. Johnson, University of Memphis
Participants:
- Courtney N. Wright, University of Tennessee
- Sam Perry, Baylor University
- Jon Camp, Abilene Christian University
- Andre E. Johnson, University of Memphis
- Annette Madlock Gatison, Independent Scholar
- Tina M. Harris, Louisiana State University
- Rev. Michael Waters, Senior Pastor, Joy Tabernacle African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church, Dallas, Texas
In this panel, we seek participants who are engaged in research that examines the role of race in religious communication. In short, this panel seeks to understand how an understanding of race can contribute to a deeper and more meaningful understanding of religious communication. We use religious communication here to denote language and other forms of symbolic activity that motivate and/or guide people in matters of belief and faith. This panel seeks to address race in religious communication from both a historical and a contemporary perspective and to examine those explicit and implicit warrants that function in religious discourse to better help us theorize ways in which religion(s), religious communication, and race operate.
Saturday, 4:15 p.m.-5:30 p.m.
Room: Frisco 7
Vice President Spotlight:
Disrupting Sport
Chair: Daniel P. Grano, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Panelists:
- Artis Twyman, Los Angeles Rams
- Mike Butterworth, University of Texas at Austin
- Abraham Khan, Pennsylvania State University
- Meredith Bagley, University of Alabama
- Ashley Garcia, University of Nebraska – Lincoln
For more information, please contact Shawn D. Long, Vice President and Program Planner, SSCA at shawn.long@kennesaw.edu.
In other news, SSCA President Pam Bourland-Davis appointed two ad hoc committees. One has focused on an ethics statement to represent the association, and the other has reviewed association practices in the area of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Reports from both committees will be presented at the convention.