News & Updates

Western States Communication Association (WSCA) 2017 annual convention wrap-up!

This year the Western States Communication Association (WSCA) annual convention was held in Salt Lake City, Utah. Read below to hear about the experiences of our faculty members and lecturer's who attended the conference.

Dr. Amy Kilgard – A tenured faculty member and advisor for the Communication Studies Department recently attended the WSCA conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. She has attended this conference since 2004. She was part of a performance that dealt with feminist interventions in masculinist films. An example of that is the new “Ghostbusters” and how the main characters are all females. Dr. Kilgard explored 4 movies: Fight Club, The Godfather, Full Metal Jacket, and Dirty Harry.  In her performance on these films, her group did a panel about dominant masculine discourse on film and they wanted to interrupt that idea and do a feminist remake of masculine films. Fight Club was converted to Fight “Book” Club, The Godfather turned into The “Godmother”, Full Metal Jacket transpired into “Full Figured Jacket” and finally Dirty Harry was turned into Dirty Harriet. She enjoyed her experience at WSCA 2017. And expect to see her at WSCA 2018 in Santa Clara!

Dr. Suzanne Pullen – First off, congratulations to Suzanne's interest group Top Debut/Top Student/Top paper for winning the Top Debut paper award! Dr. Pullen, a lecturer and the current Chair of the Performance Studies Interest Group, has been attending WSCA since 2008. When asked about her experience at WSCA, Suzanne mentioned one positive was seeing old friends, while one negative was not being able to see all the performance panels she wanted to because being Chair of the Performance Studies Interest Group came first. She did, however, manage to see two performance panels: “Indigenous Digital Story Telling” and “Queer Masculinities.”  Next year WSCA will be held at Santa Clara,CA and Suzanne hopes for more students to participate and explore their horizons!

Nicholas Chivers— A Communication Studies lecturer has been attending WSCA since 2013 and he says every year that he attends, he always feels "reinvigorated, energized and repassionate.” WSCA is a smaller conference and more intimate than most. He likes the fact that WSCA is more about “what WE do” rather than “what I do”. Prof. Chivers is interested in possibly taking on a leadership role in the interest group at a community college level. Not this year he said but is definitely exploring and gathering more data and content to pursue the leadership role. He is looking forward to attending WSCA in the upcoming years because it gives him a renewed passion in the communication discipline and encourages those who are interested to attend WSCA in Santa Clara in 2018!