06/02/2020

Building Resilient Learned Societies in an Age of Pandemic and Fear

Crafting a new normalcy

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Trevor Parry-Giles. Trevor is the Executive Director of the National Communication Association (NCA) and a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland. He has served as editor of Communication Quarterly and is a Distinguished Research Fellow and a Distinguished Teaching Fellow of the Eastern Communication Association. Parry-Giles’ research and teaching focus on the historical and contemporary relationships between rhetoric, politics, law, and popular culture.

In 1918, the still-new National Association of Academic Teachers of Public Speaking (now the National Communication Association) faced a very real problem — should it hold its annual convention when the nation was at war? For the first (and only) time in its history, the association’s leaders cancelled its annual meeting, saying to the membership that everyone’s first purpose in 1918 was to prevail in the Great War.

The NCA convention bounced back in 1919, and the annual convention that winter in Chicago saw attendance growth of nearly 20%. NCA has held its annual convention every year since. Three weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, members gathered for the 1941 convention in Detroit and thousands gathered two months after September 11, 2001 in Atlanta for NCA’s 87^th annual convention. Now, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I return to this history for lessons in resilience and for guides to the future of learned societies emerging from these challenging times.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.