Activism and Social Justice Division

article type:
Interest Group Awards 2021

Listed here are awards given by the Interest Group to its members. Interests Groups are smaller communities within NCA’s large membership that provide a range of resources including networking opportunities, Annual Convention programming, leadership opportunities, awards, and specialized information dissemination channels, among others.

Read more about this Interest Group.

Activism and Social Justice Community Engagement Award

Year Award Winner
2025 Satarupa Dasgupta
2024 Andre Johnson
2023 Leandra Hinojosa Hernández
2022 No award given
2021 Sahar Khamis
2020 Shardé M. Davis

Activism and Social Justice Pedagogy Award

Year Award Winner
2025 Raisa Alvarado
2024 Emily Krebs
2023 Angela Denise Mensah nee Prater
Ellen W. Gorsevski
2022 Satarupa Dasgupta
2021 Sergio Juárez
2020 No award given

Activism and Social Justice Scholarly Influence Award

Year Award Winner
2025 No award given
2024 Ahlam Muhtaseb
2023 Dana L. Cloud
2022 No award given
2021 No award given
2020 Leandra Hernandez

Graduate Student Activist Award

Year Award Winner
2025 Samuel Ajala
2024 Naim Aburaddi
2023 Cassidy D. Ellis
2022 Savannah Greer Downing
2021 Primavera L. Martinez
2020 Joy Melody Woods

Top Paper Award

Year Award Winner
2025 Shannon Burth, Srividya Ramasubramanian, Alexandra Scrivner, and Fuhaid Alajmi, “How Student Journalists Shape Global Social Movements: Analyzing Gaza Solidarity Encampments Across 14 Campus Newspapers”
2024 John Vilanova, “Spectacular Whiteness: The Tactics and Mediation of White Protests for Black Lives”
2023 Deborah Thomson, “Decontainment: HB2 Fallout and the Fight for Trans Rights”
2022 Michael F. Klajbor-Smith, “#NeverAgain Means Never Again For Anyone: Jewish Memory And Legitimizing Radical Protest”
2021 Stephanie Kaczynski, “‘Sixteen Shots and a Cover-Up!’: News Media Discourse of Chicago’s Fight for Police Reform”
2020 Sue Lockyer & Christopher “CJ” Koenig, “At the intersection of method and empowerment: Lessons from a pilot Photovoice study among Human Trafficking Survivors”
2019 Joshua Paul Ewalt, “Oscillating Scale and Articulating Regions: Exploring Power Geometries as a Genre of Activist Rhetoric in People’s Tribune’s Coverage of Benton Harbor, Michigan”
Billie Murray, “Reimagining Activism as Combative”
2018 Srividya “Srivi” Ramasubramanian & Alexandra Sousa, “Blurring the Boundaries, Balancing the Tensions: Examining Self-Identity, Risks, Challenges, and Opportunities for Communication Scholar-Activists”
Christina R. Foust & Paige Alfonzo, ““ASHÉ!:” A Media Ecology of the 2015 University of Missouri Protests”
2017 Timothy Paul Huffman, Saint Louis University & Sarah Jane Tracy, Arizona State University, “Making Claims that Matter: Heuristics for Theoretical and Social Impact in Qualitative Research”
2016 Nicholas S. Paliewicz, “Policing a Climate for Change: The Architecture of Consensus at the 2014 People’s Climate March”

Top Student Paper Award

Year Award Winner
2025 Juliet Letteney, “Donning the Den of Degeneracy: Détournement in T-Shirt Rhetoric as Solidarity in Academic Freedom”
2024 Abigail Burns, “The Rhetorics of Weaponized Ignorance”
2023 Jessica Lauren Chaplain, “‘Pay up, Pay up, Pay up for Loss and Damage’: Forging Climate Justice Coalitions and Solutions at COP27”
2022 Mohammad Salih, “Platform Coloniality: Facebook at the Intersection of Capitalism and Nation-State Internal Colonialism”
2021 Yena Kang, “#YellowPeril Supports Black Power: Performing Affective Memory Work for Solidarity”
2020 Jeff Tischauser, “Between social justice scholarship and activism: A methodological toolkit for racial outsiders”
2019 Joshua Ratel- Khan, “Calling-Out vs. Calling-In: The Internal Rhetoric of Activist Counterpublics”
Carmen Hernandez-Ojeda, “Advocating for a Decolonizing Reframing of ‘Youth Bullying'”
2018 Amrut Mishra, “Archival Ashes: Nostalgia, Video, and Queer Remains”
2017 Rachel Elizabeth Presley, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Rhetorical Strategies for Environmental Protection and Cultural Resistance in the Dakota Access Pipeline Movement”
2016 Christopher Scott Thomas, “‘A Global Environmental Movement that Protects Us All’: Whiteness, Racial Scripts, and the Southwest Organizing Project’s (SWOP) Letter to the Group of Ten”