UFCJC faculty and graduate students to present and receive awards at the 2026 AEJMC Conference

University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications (UFCJC) faculty and graduate students will be recognized at the 2026 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Conference in New Orleans from Aug. 5-8.

At the meeting, UFCJC scholars will give 55 presentations, surpassing the University of Missouri and Syracuse University with 50 and 32, respectively.

Award honorees include:

• International Communication Division First Place Student Paper to doctoral student Samuel Arowosafe and colleagues for “Algorithmic Gatekeeping in African Journalism: Platform Dependency, Material Consequences and Adaptive Strategies in Nigeria and Kenya.”
• First Place Magazine Media Division Faculty Paper Award to doctoral student Thu Dang and colleagues “Shaping and Reflecting Feminism: Five Decades of Ms. Magazine Covers.”
• Advertising Division Top Special Topics paper to Advertising Assistant Professors Jeongmin Ham and Won-Ki Moon for “Strategies for Increasing Webtoon Awareness in the U.S.: From Media Discovery to Cultural Signals.”
• Media Production, Management, and Technology Professor Jasmine McNealy will receive the Promising Research Award and Top Faculty Research-in-Progress Submission, Law and Policy Division for “The Jurisprudence of Refusal: Systemic Resistance to AI through Privacy, Copyright and Media Policy.”
• Moon will also receive the 2026 AEJMC Emerging Scholars Program Award for “Smarter or Just More Confident? Investigating Generative AI’s Impact on Fact-Checking, the Illusion of Expertise and Interventions for Digital Literacy.”
• Advertising Division Second Place Open Research Paper Award to doctoral student Yuan Nan and Advertising Professor Huan Chen for “Fit, Value, and Character Integrity: How Audiences Evaluate Anime-Like Virtual Influencer Endorsements”
• Advertising Division Top Special Topics Paper to doctoral students Nan and Xinyi Zuo and Chen: for “Authentic Innovation or Corporate Shortcut? How Consumers Interpret AI-Generated Advertising.”
• Advertising Associate Professor Kasey Windels and doctoral student Sarah Karl and colleagues will receive the Advertising Division Top Teaching & Pedagogy paper for “Is Your Teaching Keeping Pace with the Real World?: A Typology Framework to Strengthen Advertising Education Amid Transformations.”

Also, UFCJC Dean Hub Brown will receive the 2025 Scripps Howard Journalism Awards Journalism & Mass Communication Administrator of the Year Award. The award honors outstanding administrators in journalism education. Harrison Hove, associate instructional professor and chair of the Department of Journalism, was named a finalist for the prestigious 2025 Scripps Howard Teacher of the Year award.

AEJMC is a nonprofit educational association of journalism and mass communication educators, students and media professionals. The mission is to promote the highest possible educational standards, to cultivate the widest possible range of communication research, to encourage the implementation of a multi-cultural society in the classroom and curriculum and to defend and maintain freedom of communication to achieve better professional practice and a better-informed public.

The theme of the 2026 AEJMC Conference is “Jazz & Jambalaya: Nurturing Harmony and Health in Higher Education.”

Category: College News, Student News
Tagged: 2026 AEJMC Conference AEJMC Harrison Hove Huan Chen Hub Brown Jasmine McNealy Jeongmin Ham Kasey Windels Samuel Arowosafe Sarah Karl Thu Dang Won-Ki Moon Xinyi Zuo Yuan Nan
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