The Eighth Year of the Aberje Awards

The International Aberje Award was established in 2009 and recognizes excellence in academic work that focuses on Latin America. The award is in its 8th year and took place on Saturday, March 5, at the Holiday Inn near the University of Miami. The Ceremony was part of the 18th Annual International Public Relations Research Conference.

The following is a brief history of the awards given in previous years.

The 1st International Aberje Award held on March 14, 2009 was given to Karina Garcia-Ruano, a doctoral student at Michigan State University. She is originally from Guatemala. Her research focused on public relations in Guatemala and the identification of critical variables and the environment that make up the local industry.

On March 13, 2010 the 2nd International Aberje Award was given to American Angela Fischer, a graduate student at Boston University, for her work entitled “The Licensed Ethical Conscience: the study of Public Relations Ethics in Brazil.” The study was part of a qualitative research presented in a academic journal which included 16 in depth interviews with Brazilian professionals.

The 3rd International Aberje Award was won on March 2, 2011 by Maria de Fatima Oliveira Ph.D for her work “Multicultural Environments and their challenges to crisis communication.” As a professor at the University of North Carolina she analyzed the cultural influences in the management of crisis from qualitative interviews with 25 media professionals. Her goal was to develop guidelines for communicators to deal with new demands.

Sufian Muhammad-Baksh, from the University of Scranton, was the winner of the 4th International Aberje Award on March 9, 2012 for his paper “Using the Heuristic Systematic Model to investigate a possible emerging trend: How public relations spokesperson gender and ethnicity effect audience perceptions of spokesperson, organization and message credibility.”

The 5th International Aberje Award was presented at a ceremony on March 8, 2013 to Helga Pereira, of Brigham Young University, author of the work “How is diversity portrayed in the websites of Brazilian corporations? An analytical study.” Her objective was to investigate how the largest and most successful Brazilian corporations define issues of diversity and how they are portrayed to the public who access their websites. For her research Pereira analyzed the sites of the top Brazilian corporations listed in the Forbes 2000 Biggest Public Companies.

On March 8, 2014 the 6th International Aberje Award was given to Nathaly Aya Pastrana, who attended the Swiss-Italian University of Lugano / Switzerland. Her Master’s work entitled “Corporate Social Responsibility: Perceptions and practices Among SMEs in Colombia” was written under the guidance of Professor Krishnamurthy Sriramesh from Purdue University in the US. The study sought to understand the perceptions and  practices of Corporate Social Responsibility using a sample of small and medium-sized Colombian companies.

During a ceremony which took place on March 7, 2015, The 7th International Aberje Award was presented to Martina V. Kloss and Professor Lynne M. Sallot for their study, developed at the University of Georgia, entitled “Corporate Stewardship in Public Relations Here and Lá and/e Aqui e There: How Top Companies in the U.S. and Brazil Use Their Websites to Build and Maintain Relationships.”