Fusion at the 2026 International Communication Association Conference

Adapted from a post Kaiping Chen

Sara Ostad Rahimi received both the Best Division Poster Award and the Best Student Poster Award from the Environmental Communication Division of the International Communication Association at ICA26 in Cape Town, South Africa. The awarded paper was coauthored with Jacklyn Alsbro and advisor Prof. Kaiping Chen.

The project is part of the group’s collaboration with the Fusion Impacts Collaborative, supported by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). Fusion energy is a promising but socially and politically complex energy technology. Drawing on interviews with fusion experts, the study examines how experts’ understandings of public engagement are shaped by their imagined publics and broader sociotechnical imaginaries.

The work speaks to a central question for emerging technologies: how expert communities can build more meaningful knowledge co-production practices with publics, rather than treating public engagement as an afterthought.

The is excited to continue developing this line of work. Next steps include a meeting with Wisconsin State Representative Wittke to discuss the study’s policy implications, along with the design of a survey experiment to better understand how to communicate about fusion technologies to different publics.

Chen praised Rahimi’s leadership and presentation of this work. Congratulations to Sara and Jacklyn, and many thanks to the Environmental Communication Division for this recognition!

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Originally posted to LinkedIn.