We are proud to announce that doctoral students Olivia Watson and Jana Kent have won the National Communication Association's Donald P. Cushman Memorial Award. The award honors the top-ranked student-authored paper from all NCA units that competitively rank papers for programming at the NCA Annual Convention. This is an amazing accomplishment and acknowledges the excellence and significance of Watson and Kent's scholarship. 

Watson and Kent won the Cushman Award for their paper submission titled “'Couldn’t you get an American?’: Navigating Communicative Disenfranchisement Experienced by Transracial Adoptive Families,” submitted to the Family Communication Division. As noted by NCA, their essay is groundbreaking in its theoretical development and advances the understanding of the social experiences and confrontations related to transracial adoption. Their work theorizes about racism, the process of communicative disenfranchisement, and strategies transracial adoptive families may use to prepare themselves and their adopted children for such encounters and to mitigate the consequences of racial discrimination.