Professor Kent Ono Wins Prestigious Award from the National Communication Association

Kent Alan Ono, Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Utah and Second Vice President of the National Communication Association (NCA), recently received NCA’s 2018 Douglas W. Ehninger Distinguished Rhetorical Scholar Award.

The award is given annually to honor scholars who have executed research programs in rhetorical theory, rhetorical criticism, and/or public address studies. Dr. Ono’s contributions to rhetorics of difference have been powerful, influential, and insightful, taking into account a wide array of media and political institutions as they relate to various racial formations and intercultural, localized contexts that span the globe. Nominators wrote that Dr. Ono’s “investigations of the rhetoricity of culture have refigured scholarly understandings of how discourses of race, identity, citizenship, and difference are symbolically produced, practiced, and challenged.”

“NCA’s annual awards honor communication scholars’ teaching, scholarship, and service,” NCA Executive Director Trevor Parry-Giles said. “Dr. Ono’s contributions to the communication discipline are noteworthy, and NCA is proud to recognize them with this award.”

Dr. Ono’s award will be presented on November 10 in at the NCA 104th Annual Convention Salt Lake City. For more information about NCA’s awards program, visit http://www.natcom.org/awards/.

The National Communication Association (NCA) advances Communication as the discipline that studies all forms, modes, media, and consequences of communication through humanistic, social scientific, and aesthetic inquiry. NCA serves the scholars, teachers, and practitioners who are its members by enabling and supporting their professional interests in research and teaching. Dedicated to fostering and promoting free and ethical communication, NCA promotes the widespread appreciation of the importance of communication in public and private life, the application of competent communication to improve the quality of human life and relationships, and the use of knowledge about communication to solve human problems.

NCA supports inclusiveness and diversity among our faculties, within our membership, in the workplace, and in the classroom; NCA supports and promotes policies that fairly encourage this diversity and inclusion.