UCSB Faculty Member-International Communication Association President Elect

Cynthia Stohl, Professor of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been elected ICA President-Elect/Select by the members of International Communication Association.

Cynthia Stohl, Professor of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has been elected ICA President-Elect/Select by the members of International Communication Association in the association’s 2010 online balloting. Her election automatically places Stohl on the association’s Executive Committee. She will also serve as Program Chair for the 2012 ICA Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, at the conclusion of which Stohl will become President of ICA. Her term of office concludes at the closing of the 2013 ICA Conference in London, England, after which she will serve an additional 3 years on the Executive Committee: as Past President for 2 years, followed by a year as the association’s Finance Chair.

A former primary school educator, Stohl joined ICA as a doctoral candidate over 30 years ago. She has served as the secretary, vice-chair, and chair of ICA’s Organizational Communication Division, winning its Top Paper award twice and a Top Three Paper award twice more; she has also served on numerous awards and nominating committees, and internationalization and restructuring task forces.

In seeking the ICA presidency, Stohl expressed her belief that her “research focus on globalization and new forms of organizing…can contribute to making ICA an even stronger, more influential organization.” Her platform centered on precisely these objectives: Enhancing ICA’s global connectivity by extending its international membership while retaining its current member base, and fostering the association’s sense of community by working to develop new ways of supporting, organizing, and scheduling conference sessions and engaging in a long-range initiative to address professional development.

Background Information on ICA

ICA is an academic association for scholars interested in the study, teaching, and application of all aspects of human and mediated communication. ICA began more than 50 years ago as a small association of U.S. researchers and is now a truly international association with more than 4200 members in over 80 countries. Since 2003, ICA has been officially associated with the United Nations as a nongovernmental association (NGO).

ICA’s know-how and expertise are available to everyone, and its diverse structure ensures the association’s relevance to a multitude of interests. ICA includes 24 divisions and interest groups, each representing a special subfield in the study of communication. Despite special interests, ICA views the communication field as a coherent discipline in which all different aspects of communication are linked by common processes, structures, theories, and methods.

Background Information on Dr. Cynthia Stohl

Prior to joining the UCSB faculty Dr. Stohl was the Margaret Church Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Communication at Purdue University. Professor Stohl’s work connects several areas in organizational and group studies. She is concerned with the relationships among internal and external communication processes as they are manifest in global collaborations. Her early research focused upon communication networks and issues of quality in global manufacturing groups and has extended to exploring the changing communication partnerships amongst workers, management, communities, and civic and multinational organizations. Her most recent work addresses a diversity of network and collective action organizations in the global context focusing specifically on the role of new communication technologies in contemporary organizing. She is a Co-Principal Investigator on a National Science Foundation Grant titled “ Technological Change and Collective Association: Changing Relationships Among Technology, Organizations, Society, and the Citizenry” and an co- investigator on a Marsden Foundation grant studying new media and the Global Social Justice Movement in New Zealand.

Professor Stohl has been the featured speaker at universities and international conferences throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Her research and teaching in organizational communication have been recognized for excellence by university and national associations. The author of over 75 books and articles Professor Stohl has been the recipient of several research awards, including the 1995 National Communication Association’s Best Book Award, and over 15 top paper awards. Last year she became the first communication scholar to receive the International Communication Association’s Outstanding Article Award two years in a row, 2007 and 2008. Also the recipient of several outstanding teaching awards, her excellence in teaching was most recently recognized in 2006 when she became one of UCSB’s “Primo Professors” and in 2007 when Professor Stohl was awarded the UCSB Distinguished Teaching Award