By Nikole Jaramillo
Edgewood College students Sadie Cordova (senior), Jena Emmert (junior), and Carly Oeding (senior) were accepted to present their research at the Central States Communication Association (CSCA) Convention, which took place April 3-6 in Omaha.
Cordova and Emmert were given spots in the President’s Undergraduate Honors Research poster session. Oeding presented on the panel “Dialogue through Mediated Portrayals.”
According to the organization’s website, “CSCA was founded in 1931 to promote the communication discipline in educational, scholarly, and professional endeavors” in the 13 Midwestern States of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio.
As the largest regional communication association in the country and the fourth largest academic communication association in the world, CSCA has 24 interest groups, caucuses, and sections to promote communication areas. To apply, students must submit their paper and abstract for panel review.
“The conference program is literally the size of a local phone book,” said Edgewood’s Professor Bonnie Sierlecki of the Communication Studies department. “This year, approximately 50 undergraduate students from around the country had their research accepted for presentation.”
Sierlecki encouraged several of her students to apply to present their work. Of those students, Cordova, Emmert, and Oeding were among the few accepted out of hundreds of undergraduate submissions, which Sierlecki hailed as a “tremendous accomplishment for the Communication Studies department.”
Cordova’s second conference of the semester
Cordova, who presented at the Midwestern Bisexual Lesbian Gay Transgender Asexual College Conference (MBLGTACC) back in February, expanded on previous research with the “Effect of Misrepresentation in Media on Queer Folk,” a group project with fellow Edgewood students Kat Davies (senior) and Madeline Moeller (junior) in Quantitative Research Methods.
Since her previous research found misrepresentation of queer women in the media, Cordova decided to find what effect this had on the community.
Emmert brings feminism to hip-hop analysis
Emmert’s project titled “Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Bitch’ Versus Tyga’s ‘Bitch’: The Dangers of the Hypermasculine Hip Hop Star,” began in Sierlecki’s Communication Studies Qualitative Research class.
A long-time hip-hop listener, Emmert noted that listening to mainstream hip-hop was getting more difficult as a feminist and ally of the LGBTQ+ community.
“As catchy as the beats are, the lyrics are incredibly hypermasculine, giving way to these messages in the industry,” Emmert said.
To learn more about these messages, Emmert analyzed the lyrics of “good” and “bad” artists of the genre. Ultimately, her goal was to find the lyrical rhetoric of mainstream hip-hop.
Oeding presents on “Dialogue through Mediated Portrayals” panel
Oeding’s project, “Film Portrayal of Teen Substance Use: The Invincibility of Adolescence,” also began in Sierlecki’s Qualitative Research class and was inspired by her internship in Dublin with Coolmine Therapeutic Community.
Oeding focused on the adolescent-focused films “The Breakfast Club,” “The Spectacular Now,” and “Beautiful Boy.” She analyzed the film’s characters based on current theories of addiction to further evaluate how the films communicate the characters’ use of drugs, and what that message was.
“I hypothesized that the films would generally have a positive, lighthearted tone towards the substance use, that it would be glamorized and consequence-free, and that the characters would meet the characteristics for what I described as the ‘invincible adolescent,’” Oeding said. “Essentially that they would have positive, consequence free experiences with substance use.”
Student testimonials
“Being able to go with Sadie and Jena made the conference even more impactful as I was able to share perspectives and experiences with two women I admire and who are also doing important research,” Oeding said.
Cordova said, “The big dream of these projects is to bring awareness to bring change, so to be able to travel and share this is an unexplainable feeling.”
“Trips like this remind me just how many opportunities we have through Edgewood to share our work,” said Emmert. “Advisers like Bonnie encourage us to submit our projects and through the Communication Studies department and the Undergraduate Student Research funding, we were able to go on this trip without spending personal funds.”
Post your comments