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.