Communication Graduate Student Wins Prestigious Bostrom Young Scholar Award

Amy Whiteside, a first-year student in the Department of Communication‘s MA program, has been named the 2024 recipient of the Southern States Communication Association‘s Robert Bostrom Young Scholar Award.

The Bostrom Award honors the most outstanding paper submitted to the Southern States Communication Association’s convention each year by a graduate student. Whiteside is the first student from the U of A to win the award since it was launched in 1987. She has received the recognition for her paper titled “How to Win Friends and Influence Elections: The January 6th Insurrection and Populist Parasocial Relationships.” The work will also be named the Top Student Paper in the conference’s Political Communication Division.

The Bostrom Award is one of many accomplishments in an outstanding first year for Whiteside. In addition to being named the recipient of the Department of Communication’s Janice Hocker Rushing Award for excellence in rhetorical studies, Whiteside has published a co-authored article in the Journal of Communication Inquiry concerning conspiracy theories in children’s television shows, as well as a review of Shani Orgad’s and Rosalind Gill’s Confidence Culture (Duke University Press, 2022) in the journal Cultural Studies.

Dr. Ryan Neville-Shepard, graduate director in the Department of Communication, praises Whiteside for her accomplishment in winning the Bostrom Award. “She actually started this research project as an undergraduate Honors student, and it’s an incredible achievement for her to be recognized as producing the top work by a graduate student after only her first semester,” he explains.

Whiteside, from Bella Vista, will receive her award at the SSCA Awards Luncheon on Saturday, April 6, in Frisco, Texas. ‘

This story also appeared in the University of Arkansas News publication.