Each year, the GCSC Division also gives an award that honors a dissertation defended in the two calendar years preceding the nomination deadline. The Division is happy to announce that the winner of the 2022 Global Communication and Social Change Best Dissertation Award is Ryan Stoldt for “Imagining the World: Personalization Algorithms and Global Media Flows on Netflix” (defended at The U of Iowa, 2021). The committee noted that Stoldt’s work is “highly relevant to the study of global communication” and scores very high on the “strength of the evidence, soundness of methodology and quality of writing”.

The Dissertation Award Committee also decided to award the runner-up prize ex-aequo to the works of Miao Lu, “Deep Ploughing: A Mobile Phone Company’s Technology Translation Between China and Ghana” (Chinese U of Hong Kong), and Rachel van der Merwe, “We Are Not South African: Decolonizing National Identity in a Post-Apartheid State” (U of Colorado Boulder). The committee noted that Lu’s work excels in “originality and detail”, while van der Merwe’s dissertation was praised for being “a delightful piece of writing” that “theorizes from South Africa in the era of digital media.” 

The quality and number of submissions for this award made the decision particularly difficult this year, the committee noted. The members of the committee also noted that the works submitted were excellent examples of research with a global perspective that seek to recenter the study of communication phenomena outside geographic spaces that have prevailed in the discipline in the past, and to challenge the established canons in the study of global communication and social change.

The Best Dissertation Award committee consisted of Prof. Radhika Gajjala, Bowling Green State U, Dr. Leah Komen, Daystar U, and Dr. Prashanth Bhat, Eastern Connecticut State U, and was chaired the Division’s Secretary, Dr. Dani Madrid-Morales, The U of Sheffield.

More details about the Best Dissertation Awards can be found at https://ica-gcsc.org/awards/best-gcsc-dissertation-award