AEJMC 2026

The AEJMC annual conference holds a special place in my heart. For as long as I have been a communication scholar, it has been my home conference. In fact, my first ever academic conference was AEJMC 2020, which was moved from San Francisco to Zoom during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. There I presented a project I led as a master’s student in the Electronic News division top papers session. This study was later published in the Journal of Science Communication. In all, that was a surreal experience to kick off my doctoral studies! After the transition to faculty life, I have started to feel a real kinship with the cohort of scholars who had their formative doctoral experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. I figure I will write about that soon, but suffice to say I think we are generally more tight-knit as a community of scholars compared to the cohorts before and after us. I figure meeting each other for the first time at online conferences or classes over Zoom made us apt at forming tight bonds with other scholars across different institutions. While AEJMC Online gave me a chance to meet many of these other scholars for the first time, I was thrilled when I had the chance to attend my first in-person conference two years later at AEJMC Midwinter in Norman, OK. Between these two conferences, it was clear to me that AEJMC would be an enduring home conference.

That has, of course, carried over to the present with AEJMC 2026 in New Orleans. Something that struck me about this conference is how much my experience at conferences has transitioned from the hustle of presenting and attending sessions to maintaining my community of scholarship. I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say that I had over 50 one-on-ones with different folks to catch up while we were in New Orleans! That was a lot of talking! A lot of these took the form of catching up with former colleagues in my doctoral program who have now moved on to other institutions as faculty, or former professors to hear the current goings-on at UT. I have always been told that this is what conferences are like for faculty. I also saw how I expect this will play out in years to come by hearing the conversations of my mentors talk with their old program mates to hear who has retired or passed away. I suppose that’s a good way to see the life cycle of academic life – our odd lifestyle where people stay in the same network for most all of their working life.

I also spent time at AEJMC with present collaborators. Frankly, there are fewer things I like less about my job than sifting through long email chains about projects. While Zoom and synchronous project meetings are nice, nothing beats an in-person meeting to solve issues with a project, and at this point I have at least one of those with a collaborator at most conferences. Saima Kazmi was the collaborator du jour at this conference for an upcoming project that I think you may enjoy. However, my highlight of most any conference that my research mentor, Spiro Kiousis, attends is his dinner. This year, we went to Luke for some good southern cookin’. Spiro is always kind enough to plan and provide a dinner for his research team at every conference the team attends, and I kind of think about it as our family dinner. While research is often discussed at these dinners, I really think the part I most look forward to is seeing my team members in a more casual setting and seeing us all interact together as friends. The “Spiro Dinner” was actually instrumental in modeling what mentorship looks like for me as a new faculty member, and I decided to carry on this tradition to the first conference I attended with students, which was AEJMC Midwinter earlier this year.

In terms of the business end of AEJMC 2026, I was elected to be the junior research chair of the Political Communication division. This is a four-year commitment that eventually transitions to chair of the division. I was quite happy to take on the position, but to be honest I was uncertain if I wanted to run for it. As I am already the vice-chair of the Communication and the Future division of the NCA, I already have the conference service box checked in my career, so to speak. The reason I ran was really the intrinsic value of serving as a leader in the division. During my six years of involvement with AEJMC, I have floated around divisions and I have friends across nearly every division and interest group. That said, I think I have really found my home with Political Communication. It is an incredibly well run division in no small part from the leadership of scholars like Jo Lukito and Tom Johnson, and I am extremely optimistic about its future as Bingbing Zhang takes the reins. I am genuinely so happy to join the leadership of this division that has already provided so much to me as a scholar, and I think that the chance to work with the other team members is a great honor given the stellar roster.

As I reflect on the end of AEJMC 2026, I felt like I was coming home from a wonderful gathering of scholars and friends. More than any other conference, I have been welcomed into AEJMC with open arms and there’s no other crowd I’d prefer to eat beignets with! Looking forward to seeing you all again in Chicago!