Associate Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala and Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Jaishikha Nautiyal received the Monograph of the Year Award for their co-authored article “Queer desi kinships: Reaching across partition.” The article appears in the Tier-1 journal QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, and articulates non-Western, and specifically South-Asian, queer praxes. The award is from the National Communication Association’s GLBTQ Division. The article can be read here.

The Communication Studies Department was well-represented at the 2024 Biennial Public Address Conference. This is a highly-selective, invitation-only conference that showcases scholarship and responses from leading scholars in Rhetoric and Communication Studies. The University of Texas at Austin hosted this conference September 22-25. Associate Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala (LB) was one of the eight invited plenary speakers to the conference. She delivered an address, titled “Caste is not a metaphor,” as a call to the field to grapple with its ignorance of caste, and to reckon with how caste bolsters “model minority” and white supremacist discourses. Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Raquel Moreira responded to Dr. Angela Aguayo’s plenary, “Youth Production as Public Address,” in which she articulated a series of questions regarding the potential of networked space to produce liberatory content. Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Jaishikha Nautiyal participated in a panel titled “Anti-DEI legislation in Texas” and presented her work on “anaerobic rhetoric,” in light of the anti-DEI legislation in Florida, based on a forthcoming publication in Quarterly Journal of Speech.

Associate Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala presented on a featured “supersession” at the Rhetoric Society of America biennial conference. The panel focused on climate catastrophes, and Bahrainwala spoke about manual scavenging among Dalits, the framing of Muslims as “climate culprits,” and the ongoing green colonialism of Palestine.

Associate Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala (LB) published an article along with co-author Dr. Jaishikha Nautiyal in the journal QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. The article, “Queer Desi Kinships: Reaching across Partition,” offers ethnographic accounts of how casteism, anti-Muslim sentiment, and anti desi-queerness diminish desi solidarities in white and western contexts, including academia. They argue that the 1947 Partition of Pakistan and India is still ongoing, and worldwide. Dr. Nautiyal is also joining the Communication Studies Department in Fall 2024, and we are very lucky to have her. The article can be read here.

Associate Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala and SU students R’Yani Vaughn ’24 and Sydney Wahl ’24 attended the 2024 Western States Communication Association (WSCA) Undergraduate Scholars Research Conference in Reno, NV. Lamiyah supervised R’Yani and Sydney’s senior projects, which were anonymously reviewed and competitively selected for presentation: “Exploring Depictions of Black Motherhood in the Music Industry,” R’Yani Sydnee-LeChe’ Vaugn, and “From Samoan Warrior to American Traitor: The Media Framing Creations plus Exceptionalism, Nationalism, and Masculine Perfectionism Reactions that hanger the Course of Football Star Manti Te’o’s Life,” Sydney Lee Wahl. Senior scholars as well as the WSCA President themself spoke with these students and attempted to recruit them to their graduate programs. Congratulations to these impressive students!