Introduction: Celebrating Graduate Scholarship

Abstract

It is with great pleasure that I am writing this introduction to this special issue of Stream: Culture/Politics/Technology dedicated to the conference proceedings of the Graduate Masters Sessions (GMS) hosted by the Canadian Communication Association/Association Canadian de Communication (CCA-ACC) at our annual meeting with the Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Calgary in 2016. As the former President of the CCA (2014-2016), I worked for several years as a champion of the Graduate Masters Session, seeing them as a vital means of professionalizing young scholars in our discipline. Not only an opportunity for master’s students to “experience” a large conference and develop the skills necessary present their research to a conference audience, the GMS provide early graduate students with an important opportunity to network, build a community, and see how their work participates in a conversation with students and more senior scholars of communication from across Canada. I have been delighted to oversee the GMS sessions over the last few years, in no small part because I, like my colleagues on the Board of the CCA, value that conversation and the critical contributions made at our annual meetings. Sibo Chen, the English Language Graduate Student Representative on the CCA Board (2015-2017), is to be credited with the idea to produce conference proceedings of the GMS as without his focused energy it would never have gotten off the ground. Further thanks must be extended to the Guest Editors for this issue, Philippa Adam, Chris Chapman, and Dugan Nichols of Simon Fraser University, for their work in cultivating the four papers that appear here. Their work has undoubtedly contributed greatly to the further professionalization of the contributors as they embark on extending the dissemination of their research through publication.