Eletra Gilchrist-Petty, a professor and department chair of the Communication Arts Department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has received the Black Caucus Rex Crawley Outstanding Service Award from the National Communication Association.
The association’s mission is to advance communication as the disciple that studies all forms, modes, media and consequences of communication through humanistic, social scientific and aesthetic inquiry. Caucuses within the organization represent specific demographic or socially defined segments of the membership at large.
The award is named in honor of the late Rex Crawley, a professor at Robert Morris University and a prolific researcher.
Gilchrist-Petty teaches a wide variety of communication classes at UAH. Her programs of research focus on instructional communication, interpersonal communication and African American communication from both the quantitative and qualitative perspectives.
“One thing I love about the communication discipline is that it is very experiential,” said Gilchrist-Petty. “We not only study theories and concepts, but we actually examine how the literature is experienced in our day-to-day lives in so many areas, including relationships, social media, persuasion and influence, work groups and the media, just to name a few.”