The 36th annual Covert Award in Mass Communication History is awarded to Katie Day Good, assistant professor of strategic communication, Department of Media, Journalism and Film, and affiliate faculty, American Studies, at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. 

Good won for her article “Sight-Seeing in School: Visual Technology, Virtual Experience, and World Citizenship in American Education, 1900–1930.” Technology and Culture, 60, no. 1 (2019): 98-131.

Good argues that the influx of media technologies into schools between 1900 and 1930 was facilitated by an emergent technoutopian rhetoric in American culture that placed new social value on the acquisition of virtual and worldly experience. Her article thus provides a critical historical perspective for present-day discussions about the importance of global citizenship and mediated learning in an age of ubiquitous technology and globalization.

The committee congratulates Good for her wonderful job of placing the changing role of visuals, including National Geographic, into the larger societal changes of the Progressive era. Her archival study is a fine example of robust historical research informed by theories of cultural studies, rhetorical analysis, and the role of new technologies.

The award, endowed by the late Catherine L. Covert, a professor of public communications at Syracuse University and former head of the AEJMC History Division, goes to the article or chapter in an edited collection that represents the year’s best essay in mass communication history.

The article was selected from 10 articles nominated.

The Covert Committee includes the current and past heads of the History Division and previous winners of the award. Committee members this year were: Teri Finneman, University of Kansas; Erika Pribanic-Smith, University of Texas at Arlington; Ana Stevenson, International Studies Group, University of the Free State, South Africa; Richard B. Kielbowicz, University of Washington; and Sheila Webb, Committee Chair, Western Washington University.

The History Division will present Good with a $200 award and she will be honored at the division’s Awards Gala during the virtual AEJMC annual conference in August.