USC Aiken Prof Earns Award from Communication Association

Aiken, SC (10/01/2019) — During its annual conference in Hilton Head, the Carolinas Communication Association awarded Dr. Jason Munsell the Ray Camp Research Award - for the third time.

"I heard some great papers at the conference, and I'm honored mine was selected for the Camp Award," said Munsell, an associate professor of communication at the University of South Carolina Aiken.

The award committee chose Munsell based on his paper titled, "Sustaining Interest in Disciplinary History: Fritz Kunkel, Elwood Murray's 'Speech Personality' and the Guilt of Speech Hygiene."

Munsell's scholarly interests almost always revolve around teaching and learning. When he was working on his doctorate at Louisiana State University in the late '90s, he focused on rhetorically analyzing discourses of higher education such as congressional speeches by Justin Morrill in support of what would become the 1862 Land Grant.

From there, he became particularly interested in both the scholarship of teaching and learning as well as disciplinary history. More recently, Munsell has been invested in the rhetoric and performance of public memory spaces and places, new pedagogical technologies, including the art and craft of "sweding" films. He considers himself a rhetorician -- a scholar of rhetoric and public address -- as well as a performance studies scholar and performer, always deeply invested in teaching and learning.

The paper presented at CCA, grew out of an interest in disciplinary history. In the paper, Munsell closely analyzes the work of Elwood Murray.

Murray's main contribution to teaching speech was his book, The Speech Personality, The Integration of the Speaker: The Grosser Speech Skills, Textbook and Guidance Manual of Individual and Class Projects, originally published in 1937 with new editions in '39 and '44. It was part of the speech hygiene movement in communication.

"The general idea of speech hygiene was that teaching effective speaking skills would result in more mentally stable students," Munsell explained.

"They called that stability the 'speech personality.'"

Thus, the movement drew a lot from psychology, particularly ideas from depth-psychologist Fritz Kunkel. Munsell contextualizes Murray's work through Kunkel's writings.

"This is crazy stuff," Munsell says.

After thickly describing and analyzing Murray's approach -- and problematizing it -- Munsell concludes that though the speech hygiene movement had many limitations, scholars and practitioners can see how movements and trends in the communication discipline result, in part, because of larger cultural and social influences.

The Camp Award is given annually to a faculty-authored research paper and is decided by blind review of all papers accepted for the annual conference, according to a CCA press release.

The Carolina Communication Association began the award in 2001 in honor of Ray Camp, a longstanding member of the organization.

This marks the third time Munsell has received the award.

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