The 2025 National Communication Association convention marked a decisive inflection point in the discipline’s institutional and intellectual history. For the first time, the presidential succession line is held consecutively by three Black women scholars who embody a palpable ethic of care and generosity, a formation that extends and deepens the legacy nurtured by the association’s first Palestinian American president while simultaneously witnessing the visible ascent of South Asian scholars into the highest elected offices and onto the ballot for future leadership. This configuration is not ornamental diversity; it constitutes a material reconfiguration of epistemic authority within a field whose normative center has, for the better part of a century, remained stubbornly white and masculinist.
Under this leadership the NCA has enacted a series of structural interventions whose significance will likely be studied for decades. The association became one of the earliest major learned societies to issue an unequivocal public statement naming the ongoing violence in Gaza as genocide, thereby modeling a form of scholarly position-taking that refuses the false neutrality so often demanded of academic organizations. It commissioned and published an Academic Freedom Task Force report whose analysis of academic freedom names settler colonialism, imperialism, whiteness and far right Zionism; outlines the encroaching authoritarianism on U.S. campuses as part of a global far right phenomenon; and centers a justice based approach, providing the field with an archival document that anticipated the current conjuncture. It has deliberately expanded mentoring infrastructures, legal infrastructures, award criteria, and publication priorities so that embodied knowledges, decolonial methodologies, and critical race inquiry are recognized as central rather than peripheral to communication scholarship.
These developments did not emerge ex nihilo. They represent the cumulative yield of sustained coalitional labor, often unremunerated and frequently contested, undertaken across multiple leadership cycles. They also signal a shift in the association’s institutional habitus: from a posture of cautious liberalism to one of principled accountability to the most marginalized voices within and beyond the academy.
Such transformations, however, remain precarious. The predictable counter-discourse has already begun to circulate—charges of ideological capture, invocations of declining rigor, accusations that identity has eclipsed merit. These are not novel objections; they are the recurrent grammar of backlash that accompanies every expansion of the disciplinary commons. What is new is the capacity of the current membership, galvanized by visible and courageous leadership, to recognize this rhetoric as the defensive reflex of a prior epistemic order rather than as legitimate critique.
The task ahead is therefore both intellectual and political: to institutionalize these gains so that they outlast any single leadership structure, to continue widening the circle of recognition without conceding the terrain of rigor, and to insist, as these leaders have modeled, that care and critique, solidarity and scholarship, are not oppositional but mutually constitutive commitments.
In 2020 many of us experienced the NCA as an organization still learning how to speak uncomfortable truths. In 2025 we leave the convention having witnessed a scholarly association that has begun, imperfectly but unmistakably, to inhabit those truths as infrastructural reality. That movement—from aspiration to enactment—is the measure of how far the discipline has traveled in half a decade. It is also the ground from which the next phase of transformative possibility must be imagined and defended. The historical record will note the demographic milestones. The more enduring contribution, however, lies in the qualitative reorientation of institutional power toward justice: a reorientation made possible by leaders who refused to mistake civility for neutrality and by a collective membership increasingly willing to hold the space such leadership requires.
The work is far from complete, but the horizon has unmistakably shifted, and the discipline is, for the first time in its modern history, beginning to look like the world it presumes to study.