Stephanie Kaczynski was awarded a Top Paper Award for the Activism & Social Justice Division of NCA 2021 for her paper “‘Sixteen Shots and a Cover-Up!’: News Media Discourse of Chicago’s Fight for Police Reform.”
The Activism and Social Justice Division promotes scholarship (research and teaching) that explores relationships among communication, activism, and social justice. Activism and social justice scholarship ranges from explorations of researcher-activists and teacher-activists employing their communication resources (e.g., theories, methods, pedagogies, and other practices) in collaboration with community members whose lives are affected by oppression, domination, discrimination, and other sociopolitical struggles due to differences in race, gender, class, sexual orientation, age, ability, religion, and other identity markers, and/or with justice-oriented groups, organizations, and social movements to intervene into and reconstruct unjust discourses in more just ways, to analyses of communication enacted by activist individuals, groups, and/or organizations to promote social justice. The division welcomes conceptual, theoretical, methodological, empirical, and exploratory/experimental work about, and encourages dialogue, discussion, debate, and performance of, communication, activism, and social justice.