Department of Communication Studies Hosts the 2024 Houston Communication Symposium
On Wednesday, April 17, 2024, the Department of Communication Studies hosted its annual Houston Communication Symposium. This event is named for Frank K. Houston, a Vanderbilt Student. in the 1930s, well before the University had a Communication Studies Department. However, Vanderbilt did have courses in public speaking, in which Houston was a student. An accomplished banker and philanthropist, Houston maintained that the key to his success in business was the public speaking training that he had received at Vanderbilt. As a result, he decided to fund this contest in order to recognize and encourage good public speaking skills. Upon his death in 1973, a permanent endowment was set up for the contest.
The Houston Symposium is tied to one of Communication Studies’ advanced classes: Communication and Media Studio (CMST 3800). In this course, students begin the semester by reading scholarly writing about media, art, and design as forms of communication and sites for advocacy. Then, they embark on their own research process, designing their own individualized syllabi with readings related to a topic of their own choosing. Over the course of the semester, students create a variety of media and art projects and deliver multiple public speeches related to their research. The semester culminates in the students’ creation of a final project that they present at the Houston Symposium. In addition, select students are chosen by their classmates to deliver a speech at the event. Audience members vote for the project that they find to be the most effective, and a panel of judges selects the most effective speaker.
Student projects at the 2024 Houston Symposium addressed a range of topics, including food waste, the ethics of AI in collegiate sports, anti-Blackness in the history of animated cinema, and anti-Semitism in war reporting; and the projects took a variety of formats, including a prototype for a digital app, website, short film, and podcast.
This year’s speakers were Olivia Gordon, Shayda Niksefat, and Karalyn Smith-Ross. Gordon spoke about contemporary anxieties and rhetoric about children’s digital play and the children’s book she wrote and illustrated to help parents and children address this issue. Niksefat spoke about the capsule collection she created for a fashion line designed to be both inclusive for all genders and body types and ecologically sustainable, repurposing thrifted ties to create new clothing pieces. Smith-Ross discussed the importance of third spaces as sites at which people can create community, bolster commitment to the public good, and resist the harms of late-stage capitalism, and she created a miniature model of how an ideal third space might look and feel.
The audience chose Niksefat’s fashion line as the winning project, and the judges selected Gordon as the top speaker. Congratulations to all the participants and the winners and thanks to the Houston Endowment and the Department of Communication Studies for supporting this event!