[Air-L] CONGRATS to Taneja & Wu for winning the ICA Outstanding Article Award!

[Jack Qiu]

Dear all,

Some of you must have known this. But a great piece of news deserves wide
circulation. ICA (International Communication Association) just gave its
most prestigious Outstanding Article Award of 2015 to Harsh Taneja and
Angle Wu for their study of China's Great Firewall and the effects of
Internet censorship upon users' global Web-surfing patterns. If you haven't
read its final published version, here you go:


*Harsh Taneja & Angela Xiao Wu (2015). “Does the Great Firewall Really
Isolate the Chinese? Integrating Access Blockage with Cultural Factors to
Explain Web User Behavior", The Information Society, 30(5), 297-309.*

This is an ICA-wide award that honors an article published in a refereed
journal during the previous two calendar years. Selection criteria include
coherence of argument, quality of conceptual development, and effective use
of evidence. The selection committee prefers articles that promise to be
influential over time, within a particular field of communication and also
across fields.


In his nomination letter, Prof. James G. Webster, who is a leading scholar
in the field, wrote: “The article takes up a question that is of broad
interest to academics, policy-makers and many members of the general
public; to what extent are Chinese internet users isolated from the rest of
the World Wide Web and is the ‘Great Firewall’ responsible? There’s a good
deal of rhetoric and theorizing that surround this question, but
surprisingly little empirical work to tell us what’s actually going on.
Taneja and Wu intervene in this conversation with research that is
theoretically grounded and based on high quality data that are analyzed in
inventive ways. The result is a powerful demonstration of how carefully
conceived and executed communication research can address multiple
audiences and inform questions of public importance.”


The award ceremony will be on May 23 at the 2015 ICA Annual Conference in
San Juan, Puerto Rico. There will also be an informal reception at this
year's CCA (Chinese Communication Association) gathering in San Juan --
time and place to be decided -- for this special honor, not just for Harsh
and Angela, but for all colleagues doing Internet research as well!


Cheers!!!

jack qiu