The Communication Studies program at the University of St. Thomas is proud to invite you and your students to the 30th anniversary of the Undergraduate Communication Research Conference (UCRC) to be held at our downtown Minneapolis campus on Friday, April 28th, 2023. The conference was begun in the spring of 1990 with the intention of providing a forum for students to present the research work they had done on communication issues, and today, we offer that same opportunity for students to share their research with colleagues from across the US. We also wanted to provide students and faculty with a keynote address from one of the luminaries in the field of Communication Studies, starting with Dr. James Chesebro, then president of the Speech Communication Association, and including such important scholars as John Cragan, Judith Martin, Sonja Foss, Bruce Gronbek and many others.
We are also pleased to announce that our Keynote Address will be given this year by Professor Catherine Palczewski, from the University of Northern Iowa. Her address is titled “Public Woman: Women's Rhetoric from the 19th Amendment to the 2020 Presidential Campaign” and she will tie together the change in women’s advocacy with “the way the discipline of communication researches advocacy: whom we study, how we study them, and the questions we ask as researchers.” It will be a fascinating and timely discussion as Dr. Palczewski discusses how communication research on advocacy “has been expanded by attention to intersectionality: the way race, class, citizenship, sexuality, and sex intersect.”
So please put the UCRC on your calendar and begin to invite students to participate in what will be a wonderful celebration of their work in the field of Communication Studies! If you have any questions, please email commucrc@stthomas.edu.