GCSC Celebrates Excellence
The ICA Global Communication and Social Change (GCSC) Division is pleased to recognise outstanding scholarship and contributions to the field through its 2026 awards. These honours reflect the diversity, innovation, and global reach of research shaping communication and social change today.
Best Paper Awards
The African Journalism Studies Best Paper Award was awarded to Morgan Wack for the paper “Assessing the Influence of Community-Led Interventions on Reductions in Election Falsehoods: Experimental Evidence from South Africa.” The study offers important empirical insights into the role of community-driven approaches in countering misinformation in electoral contexts.
The GCSC Student Best Paper Award was awarded to Mengfei Li for “Governance, Affect, and Algorithmic Mediation in Global HIV Communication: An Analytic Autoethnography of the U=U Campaign in Asia Pacific.” The paper advances critical perspectives on health communication, platform governance, and lived experience.
The GCSC Top Faculty Paper Award was awarded to Xiaoya Jiang, Martín Echeverría, and Hyerin Kwon for “Public expression about presidential debates in Latin America on Twitter (X): Social network features, influential nodes, and top messages in six countries.” Their work provides a comparative analysis of digital political communication across the region.
A runner-up prize for the Top Faculty Paper Award was also awarded to Morgan Wack for the paper “Assessing the Influence of Community-Led Interventions on Reductions in Election Falsehoods: Experimental Evidence from South Africa.”
The Student Best Paper Award (runner-up) was awarded to Mingjun Zhao for “Communication Inequalities in Global Climate Discourse: An Actor-Network Approach to Algorithmic and Institutional Power.” The paper engages with key debates on inequality, climate communication, and sociotechnical systems.
Book Awards
The GCSC Best Book Award was awarded to Bilge Yesil for Talking Back to the West: How Turkey Uses Counter-Hegemony to Reshape the Global Communication Order, a significant contribution to understanding power, geopolitics, and communication.
Two Best Book Award Honorable Mentions were conferred:
- Cherian George for Fighting Polarisation: Shared Communicative Spaces in Divided Democracies
- Eugenia Mitchelstein, Pablo J. Boczkowski, María Celeste Wagner, and Facundo Suenzo for The Patina of Distrust: What People Do with Misinformation
These works offer important insights into polarisation, media trust, and democratic communication.
Dissertation Awards
The GCSC Best Dissertation Award was awarded to Facundo N. Suenzo for “Techno-Affective Ecologies: A Sociocultural History of Gay Sexuality in Post-Dictatorship Argentina.” The dissertation presents a nuanced historical and cultural analysis of sexuality, affect, and technology.
The runner-up for the Best Dissertation Award was awarded to Becky Pham for “Pop Transnational Ambivalence: Vietnamese American Youth’s Engagement with the Korean Wave.” The thesis explores identity, culture, and transnational media consumption among diasporic communities.
Celebrating a Vibrant Scholarly Community
These awards highlight the breadth and depth of research within the GCSC Division, spanning topics such as misinformation, algorithmic governance, global health communication, political discourse, and cultural identities. Together, they reflect the division’s continued commitment to fostering critical, inclusive, and globally engaged scholarship.
All awards were conferred under the leadership of Division Chair Wenhong Chen, whose stewardship continues to support the division’s dynamic and diverse intellectual community.
We warmly congratulate all awardees and look forward to their continued contributions to the field.